If you are an Amazon Prime subscriber or otherwise rent or buy a lot of Amazon Instant Video, you’ll have a one word reaction to this story: finally. Amazon has just released an official Instant Video app for the iPad.
This is the correction of what has been, up to now, a major problem with Amazon Instant Video: while Amazon’s selection of movies and TV shows to rent or buy is excellent (and in many ways exceeds Apple’s iTunes offerings), you could only watch videos on your smart TV or computer… not an iPad. That could be a frustrating thing.
It seems, though, that Amazon finally saw the light. The app streams Amazon’s library of Prime content for free to Amazon Prime subscribers, and you can download videos to watch offline. And because the whole thing uses Amazon’s Whispersync technology, if you start watching a movie on your TV and then pick it up later on your iPad, you can resume where you left off.
Unfortunately, it has some kinks.
In theory, we’re pretty psyched about this app, except for one thing: we haven’t been able to watch a single video using it yet. Every time we try to watch a movie from our Prime library, an error message pops up saying that “Playback is not allowed on this device.” iTunes reviews also call out the lack of AirPlay video support. Also, there’s no iPhone version, which seems a curious omission.
Is Amazon Instant Video working for you?
Source: iTunes
