Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Prime Music

amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 171 posts

Re: Amazon Prime Music

#51

Post by tendom »

yitchelle wrote: post #47
tendom wrote: post #44

Wooohooo, yet another amazon prime thing that isn't offered to Canadians. Considering we pay more, get "2 day shipping" which is actually 3 days because Amazon cant' seem to do math, and get no other services, and Amazon prices are rarely something to get excited about here, well Amazon, we're done. I just cancelled my amazon prime account. Apple, Netflix, and Google figured out ways to get media to Canada, but Amazo…

Do feel so bad. My amazon.de account in Germany also does not have this "prime" feature.

Well, I pay $83 a year for prime, I just don't get anything special for it.

Re: Amazon Prime Music

#52

Post by derefr »

clarkm wrote: post #41
jbarham wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never seen Amazon weaken its hold on a particular share of any market. I can see AWS being squeezed by outfits like Digital Ocean and Linode on the low end and Google Compute/App Engine on the high end. Anecdotally, I used to run some servers on AWS but moved them to DO & Linode as they're cheaper, faster & simpler.

Yeah, DigitalOcean and Linode are great if you just wanna run some servers. But AWS is much, much more than that.

It is; I just spent the last two weeks putting together a very handsome CloudFormation template that can attest to that. I'm almost considering creating a custom CF resource provider to let me spawn DigitalOcean droplets, though.

(And to let me use CloudFlare CDN distributions instead of CloudFront ones. Amazon need to either finish CloudFront, or kill it; this purgatorial state where it works but it takes 30 minutes to make any changes, and where only half of its APIs are exposed in the SDK libraries, is obnoxious.)

Re: Amazon Prime Music

#53

Post by mimighost »

jbarham wrote: post #33
quotient wrote: post #23

Wow. This is outstanding. Amazon is solidly developing a one-stop centralized base of entertainment. Even more enticing is that it's free with prime, and even if you don't have prime, it's worth getting prime for: a small fee for a year's access to most music/films you could want. And then you have prime, which makes it much more enticing to buy products on Amazon (due to cheaper, faster delivery). Smart. (I am aware…

> I've never seen Amazon weaken its hold on a particular share of any market. I can see AWS being squeezed by outfits like Digital Ocean and Linode on the low end and Google Compute/App Engine on the high end. Anecdotally, I used to run some servers on AWS but moved them to DO & Linode as they're cheaper, faster & simpler.

AWS is a ecosystem.

While I agree you point that on the lower end Amazon will lose some of its hold to the more cost-effective solution providers, IMHO, it is not facing that much pressure from GAE/GCE, for the reason that the latter is yet to provide a list of service that is as comprehensive AWS's.

https://cloud.google.com/products/ http://aws.amazon.com/

My previous project is about a data warehouse solution using Amazon Redshift. The whole stack is host on AWS: S3 for logs, EMR for ETL then Redshift for ingestion, job flow orchestrated using DataPipeline. One stand solution, work seamlessly. It really makes me appreciate the vastness and integration of AWS as a whole.

Re: Amazon Prime Music

#54

Post by plorg »

mynameishere wrote: post #32

Searched for a number of things unsuccessfully then found that Neil Young is on it. Okay, tried to play "Harvest" and it refused. The previews for the same album work, but only after letting the Flash widget run (I use flashblock). The Prime videos use Silverlight, so that was never an issue. I can't find a widget hiding anywhere for the prime music, so I'm guessing that's a bug on their part. Or maybe I have it all…

Tried it on Chrome/Linux. Audio appears to be played through a flash plugin (noted since I have "click to enable plugins" set). Checking the debugger, the service seems to use HTTP Live Streaming/m3u8 with 10-second, 400k mp2ts chunks.

Digging a touch further, chunks are apparently encoded to 256-kbps AAC, and their URLs can be captured and replayed for up to an hour. Reconstituting tracks, then, is as simple as catting all the chunks together and running them through libav.

I'm sure there are much easier ways to make unauthorized copies of music, but this actually seems fairly unprotected, though obviously not 'open', since it's using a flash-based player.

Re: Amazon Prime Music

#56

Post by L_Rahman »

derefr wrote: post #46
L_Rahman wrote: post #13

1. Given my listening habits, the library feels limited. Tried searches for the three albums I listened to the most this month ( http://www.last.fm/user/labibrahman/charts ): Sylvan Esso - Sylvan Esso Chet Faker - Built on Glass Tycho - Awake None are available for streaming. For a standalone service, this would be damning. As one of the perks offered with Prime this has the potential to become a compelling part of t…

> Next episodes don't auto play. There are actually some very strict legal requirements preventing streaming-video services from providing "linear content" (i.e. anything that works like a TV channel.) Anyone that seems to do so (e.g. Netflix) still stops every few episodes to get you to press a button to continue. Happily, this is entirely irrelevant to within-home streaming. Plex can auto-play for as long as you li…

Interesting.

I'd always assumed Netflix required that user behavior on their end to avoid serving content that wasn't actively being consumed so I'm surprised to find that it's a licensor requirement.

Re: Amazon Prime Music

#58

Post by kolev »

Limited selection like Prime Instant Video, but at least it's available on Android (although the app doesn't seem to support the new service yet and is butt-ugly). On a side note, I don't really get why Amazon is twisting our arms and doesn't offer Instant Video on Android outside of Google TV and Kindle Fire. I care less about their free videos, but I've purchased digital content and I'm not able to watch it on my Android tablet. Do they really think they can make me buy Kindle Fire just for that?

Re: Amazon Prime Music

#59

Post by kolev »

lzlarryli wrote: post #28

The classical collection seems to be small. For example, 24098 out of 658027 (3.7%) pop albums are prime, but only 894 of 171251 (0.5%) classical albums are prime. I expected the other way (wishfully, as a fan of classical music), that older less popular music is cheaper to be made prime for Amazon. Strange.

Isn't the classical also cheaper to license?

Re: Amazon Prime Music

#60

Post by kolev »

jychang wrote: post #16
curiousAl wrote: post #11

If this can match spotify's catalog any time soon, AND be available as an app or (usable) mobile site, ad free: RIP music services. This is an enticing offer for those on the fence about prime, given that spotify premium is $120 a year. For the same price, you get prime, spotify, a bit of netflix/hulu (hopefully more to come on the video end). Pretty brilliant move.

For the price, this is a really good deal. However, some people (like me) have over 200+ spotify playlists with over 100 songs, and 20+ ones that I actively use. If they want to capture spotify's market share, just having a large enough catalog wouldn't cut it. They need a easy way to convert the spotify library into their apps.

Maybe they will introduce Amazon Second, which for $5.99/mo will offer larger streaming catalog. :)
Post reply on HN