Amazon Instant Video on Apple iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch ⇒

Amazon:1

Videos you’ve purchased or rented with Amazon Instant Video will show up instantly on your Apple device once you download and sign into the app.

As a consumer this is welcome news.

As a media commentator I have no idea how Amazon makes money on this stuff. I always thought their content libraries acted as a Trojan horse to lock you into their ecosystem so you would buy more devices (a la iTunes and Apple). But if you can get an equivalent (superior?) experience on Apple’s devices, why buy a Kindle Fire HD 8.9 (blah blah blah) at all?

Which brings me back around to talk in my consumer voice. If Amazon is practically giving this content away even if I don’t buy their devices, will my TV shows in the cloud still be around in the future?2 It’s moves like this (immediately convenient but confusing over the long term) that make me want to back myself out of Amazon’s content library. It just feels unsustainable, which ain’t great since they hold onto my digital wares in perpetuity.


  1. Affiliate link. Click it and shop and I’ll make millions of pennies. ↩︎

  2. Remember when Amazon stuck their long Orwellian finger into copies of 1984 en masse↩︎