Amazon Instant Video's - lame

[dingus]

no queue, watchlist is web-based only, no sorting and grouping of titles makes the first two issues even more problematic. none of these represents any significant hurdles in regards to coding and implementation to make them available to users. this has been addressed on their help forums for well over a year without any response. seriously, whats their problem?

[markw]

They do have a great selection of long gone TV series but, as you say, virtually all seasons for most, but, as you say, there is ab-so-fargin-lutely NO discrnable order to how they display. Buffy, season 5 cound be on the fourth page, Season two, on page 8, season 4 on page 8, etc, etc...

Now, if they could at least get some sort of order here, then it will be a winner.

But, hey, we get free shipping from Amazon.

[Woochifer]

Well, that old adage "you get what you pay for" seems to apply here ... and with Amazon Prime, it's not even like they treat the streaming videos as the primary feature. More like, "Ya' want us to throw in a few movies with your prepaid free shipping?" I agree with you that the search options are horrific, which really diminishes Amazon Prime's utility for video streaming.

That said, I get the impression that Amazon has plans for its video streaming and has quietly started seeding the market for its big rollout. Just in the last few months, Amazon Video got added as a standard video playback app on the PS3, and Amazon finally released its long awaited video app for the iPad (curiously, nothing yet for the iPhone/iPod touch). And I've started seeing more Blu-ray players with the Amazon video app built in as well.

As it stands right now, the PS3 app seems further along than the iPad app. It has some Netflix-like features that group together selections based on your prior purchases, and it has some search functionality. It has a lot more refinement, and from what I've seen, the picture quality is okay. So far, I haven't seen anything as bad as some of the block-ridden crap that Netflix still streams.

OTOH, the iPad app clearly feels like a 1.0 effort. The initial release doesn't even have a text search feature. You just scroll a random mishmash, in hopes of finding something you like. Picture looks good but obviously, they wanted to get the app out there first, so it still needs a lot of work.

To be fair, Amazon has not done a lot of promotion with their video service. They've been quietly getting the video app into some Blu-ray players, but adding the PS3 and the iPad seems to signal that something's afoot. Would not surprise me if the past year has been more of a beta test -- getting the web-based service, and their Kindle Fire customers up and running. If anything, having a great user interface would likely increase the usage, and I'm not so sure that Amazon right now wants a lot of traffic swamping their system. At less than $7/month, Amazon's not going to get a lot of complaints, or at least a lot of customers irate enough to cancel the service outright, especially if they already use the free shipping.

At some point, I think Amazon will have to promote the video streaming service on its own, and make some drastic improvements to the user interface. But, it wouldn't surprise me if they're trying to get the programming lined up first, and then do a big rollout when they have the content, platform, and partners all on board.