How to Stream Amazon Instant Video on Android from Amazon.co.uk – You Can’t

26.02.2014 Nate Hoffelder 8 Comments

What with Amazon expanding their Instant Video service into the UK and Germany on Wednesday, I’ve been getting a lot of visitors who want to watch the videos on their Android tablets.

And since the UK requires a different set of tricks than the instructions I posted in January 2014, I thought it might be helpful to write a new post just for those with an Amazon.co.uk account so I can share the bad news.

At this time I do not know of a way for anyone with an Amazon.co.uk account to stream Instant Video on their Android device.

There’s a trick where you can use Adobe Flash and the Dolphin web browser to get the service working on most Android tablets, but unfortunately it won’t work with Amazon’s UK website. The trick requires Flash, and Amazon.co.uk does not support that standard.

I can’t tell you why there’s no Flash support, but I can tell you that numerous comments have already been left by frustrated readers who have confirmed the bad news.

All I can say at this point is that I looked for a solution and did not find it. If one turns up in the future I will update this post.

Sorry.

P.S. In the absence of Flash, our only option is to use Microsoft’s Silverlight standard. Unfortunately, Android is not supported – so far as I know. If this changes I will update this post.

Comments

Andy February 27, 2014 um 4:53 am

It’s such a shame Android tabs won’t work – we have prime for 8 more months (originally bought for delivery charges) but won’t be renewing as the £30 increase for streaming has no benefit and they don’t offer a 'delivery only' prime membership at present.

fjtorres February 27, 2014 um 6:56 am

Amazon Prime for Europe is just a renamed Lovefilm and Lovefilm dropped support for Flash when they switched to Silverlight in 2011.
http://blog.lovefilm.com/uncategorized/why-were-switching-from-flash-to-silverlight.html

"We’ve been asked to make this change by the Studios who provide us with the films in the first place, because they’re insisting – understandably – that we use robust security to protect their films from piracy, and they see the Silverlight software as more secure than Flash.

Simply put: without meeting their requirements, we’d suddenly have next-to-no films to stream online.

Just to be clear – this change doesn’t affect or apply to any of our streaming devices (PS3, iPad, internet TVs, etc); only PCs, laptops and Macs.

And very regrettably, Silverlight software is not supported on non-Intel Macs (those with an operating system of 10.5 or lower) or on computers using the Linux/UNIX operating systems. In fact, none of the solutions available to us allowed secure streaming to Linux users.

HTML 5 was considered, but video streaming via HTML 5 is an open-sourced solution that is still maturing, and there are simply no security protections available within HTML 5 that would allow us to stream content securely.

Silverlight offers the best combination of security, quality and customer experience from a small number of available solutions, and the majority of our customers already have Silverlight installed."

At that time both Netflix and Hulu were already using Silverlight, btw.