Amazon clearcuts Primecast
What I thought would probably happen happened a lot faster than I anticipated with Primecast as Amazon swooped in to remove the app’s abilities to stream Amazon Prime Instant video to the Chromecast in less than 36 hours.
Amazon has been pretty devoted to getting into the hardware market and eliminating any Google competition in their domain, but in the end it’s probably going to just be more added to the tales of Amazon’s horrific 2014 hardware ventures.
One reason that I’m pretty sure Amazon will offer up as a reason they disabled this third party access to the streaming service will probably be that if you allow third parties unfettered access to streaming they’re probably just going to download, save the media, distribute it illegally. However as you can already do that with a PC with the current streaming setup, that’s not really a compelling argument.
In the end, Amazon did what they thought was best for their gameplan of using software Google makes and rebranding it Fire-something. They disabled the Chromecast streaming so people would have to buy their more expensive Fire TV Stick. Unfortunately the Fire TV Stick is sold out/not out/not going to be around until after January 15, so Amazon Instant Video users are left with at least one less easy way to stream what they’ve paid for over Christmas.
As for people who plunked down the $3 to get Primecast, I don’t have any word on whether the developer gave them their money back, or took it. Either way is probably fair unless they specifically said there was going to be no Amazonian interference, but hopefully they will refund users who ask for it. If you ended up buying Primecast, drop us a note and let us know if you got a refund or requested one.
According to the Primecast blog,the developers do not know if Primecast will be back or not. That’s in Amazon’s court.
