Amazon Launches Instant Video For Nintendo Wii

If you own a Wii, you were probably a little bummed out to hear that Amazon would be serving up Instant Video to the Wii U and not to your older console.

But fret no longer, as Amazon has just announced that its library of streaming video content is now available to Wii owners.

Amazon’s Instant Video library is home to over 145,000 titles, and if you’re a Prime member you have automatic access to over 33,000 titles right off the bat.

Other features you may have grown accustomed to on Amazon’s media streaming platform are also present, including Whispersync, which lets users pick up right where they left off on another device. Like, say, a Kindle Fire.

Navigation is relatively simple, giving users categories like Recently Watched, Watchlist, Genre Recommendations and Your TV Shows.

Users will also have access to Parental Controls and Kid Zone title lists to make sure kids aren’t wandering into treacherous territory.

The service is available now to all Wii owners and can be found in the Wii Shop Channel.

Amazon Makes It Easier To Host Static Web Pages On S3

S3 is Amazon’s cloud storage service for developers, but you can also use it to host static web pages on the cheap. Amazon introduced this feature about a year ago and today, it is making it even easier to run basic sites on S3 with the addition of root domain hosting (using Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service) so users can access your site without specifying the “www” in the address and enhanced redirection functionality.

While using S3 without the rest of Amazon’s web services doesn’t allow you to host any complex sites, S3 can be a good choice for hosting basic sites and images. As there are no monthly subscription fees, you only pay Amazon’s relatively low fees for storage and bandwidth. You also don’t have to worry about updating your content management system and plugins.

As for the new features, setting them up is pretty easy. As Amazon notes, you previously needed to use a proxy server to ensure your visitors could access your site without the ‘www’ address (or use a third-party service like wwwizer). “This introduced additional costs, extra work, and another potential point of failure.” Now, you just create a new S3 bucket without the ‘www’ in the host name and choose the new “redirect all requests to another host name” option. The only semi-complicated thing here is that you also have to set this up in Route 53, but Amazon offers a pretty detailed walkthrough that explains how this works, too.

The new redirection rules, Amazon says, ” can be used to smooth things over when you make changes to the logical structure of your site” or to switch pages from static to dynamic hosting as your site grows.

Overall, these are small changes, but if you are looking for an interesting project for the long weekend, consider setting up a blog on S3 (just like Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels) and start blogging like a hacker.

Breaking News: Amazon Selling Stolen iPhones.

Ben Dreyfuss bought his mom an iPhone for Christmas. Mama D. tears open the package, finds a shiny aluminum bundle of joy, and then decides to set it up. One problem: When she called Verizon to activate the thing, they told her that her new iPhone was stolen.

Dreyfuss tweeted that the iPhone in question had been listed on Amazon’s warehouse deals as refurbished. He claimed that it originally came from an Amazon trade-in; in other words, someone likely stole the phone and sold it to Amazon.

Amazon should be responsible for checking whether the merchandise it sells is hot. Either way, Dreyfuss reported on Twitter that Amazon had instructed him to return it and was “very apologetic.”

We’re not sure if Amazon is merely going to credit the son, leaving mom short one Apple iPhone, or if they are going to send out another refurbished unit. Either way, we’re sure that Amazon will leave the customer satisfied because a retailer doesn’t grow as big as the online retailer has without keeping customers happy.

 [Source: Gizmodo]