Amazon Prime Video might be coming to Apple TV soon

Rumour has it Apple and Amazon have called a truce—at least when it comes to Amazon’s video streaming service. Amazon has been competing fiercely with the likes of Apple and Google in the video streaming space. It’s even gotten to the point where Amazon doesn’t have its Prime Video service on Apple TV or most Android TV devices and Apple TVs and Chromecasts aren’t even sold on their site.

But it looks like Amazon and Apple have at least reached an agreement when it comes to Amazon Prime Video’s availability on Apple TV. It’s presumed that Amazon will be creating an app for Apple TV and even a mobile Prime Video app for iOS. The app is rumoured to be coming out this summer. Let’s hope this is true.

Source: The Next Web

Documentaries on Formula One and Le Mans to stream on Amazon Prime Video

Photo courtesy of McLaren.com

Joining The Grand Tour on Amazon Prime Video are two motorsports-related documentaries. The new shows will focus on the McLaren Formula One team’s journey across the current F1 season and the 2017 24 Hours of Le Mans race happening in June. The unnamed Formula One series will follow the McLaren F1 team on 20 stops as it tries to catch up with the rest of the pack following its new engine deal with Honda. It’ll show everything from how the cars are built and tested to how sponsorship and partnership deals are made.

Meanwhile, Le Mans: Racing is Everything will give Amazon “unprecedented access” to the entire 24-hour race. There will be film crews following around the Porsche, Nissan, Aston Martin, Audi, Rebellion, and Toyota teams. They’ll be tagging along some high-profile drivers including Mark Webber, Nico Prost, and the 19-year-old Jann Mardenborough, who won a slot courtesy of the GT Academy e-sports competition.

Source: The Verge

Amazon Web Services to provide developers with free credit for storage and computing for Alexa skills

A new program from Amazon might encourage developers to keep building and working on Alexa skills. Amazon Web Services is offering US$100 promotional credit as well as another additional US$100 per month to help pay for extra cloud computing and storage costs third-party developers might incur when their Alexa skills exceed the limits of the existing AWS Free Tier. By taking extra cost out of the way, this benefits Amazon’s own Echo smart speakers that are powered by Alexa, among other Alexa-powered devices. Skills are the system’s version of apps and by having more developers work on those, it gives more options and capabilities to users, which in turn can entice more people to use Amazon Echo products over its competitors.

Source: Geekwire

A typo caused the big Amazon Web Services outage

Mistakes happen to the best of us but it seems just one tiny “human error” has caused embarrassment for Amazon. As you know, the Amazon Web Services went down this week and disrupted many internet services for hours. It seems the error had been a typo. On Tuesday morning, an employee doing routine maintenance mistakenly entered the wrong command while trying to take offline “a small number of servers.” What was typed in took down a “larger set of servers,” including those that support two S3 subsystems. These subsystems have the data storage service used by a number of web-based services.

With these two systems offline, it took with it many services including the ones Amazon uses to update its own status page. And with the system not having been completely restarted “for many years,” it also took “longer than expected” to bring them back up. Amazon acknowledges and apologizes for the mistake and promises it has taken safeguards to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Source: Mashable