Amazon has finally announced the arrival of its Amazon Prime Video streaming service in Australia, taking the service to more than 200 countries worldwide. This means, of course, that the most widely anticipated show of the year (in my view), Clarkson, Hammond and May’s The Grand Tour is now available legally in Australia.
Of course, there’s more than just the Grand Tour. There’s plenty of Amazon’s other original content available too, including titles such as Transparent, Mozart in the Jungle, The Man in the High Castle and most children’s series like Creative Galaxy, Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, Tumble Leaf and Wishenpoof.
The pricing is pretty sharp too, starting at $2.99 USD (or about $3.99 AUD) per month for the first six months, before reverting to $5.99 USD ($7.99 AUD) per month after that. In terms of access, would-be subscribers can sign up at PrimeVideo.com, and then watch the service on Android, iOS (both phones and tablets), on Amazon’s own Fire brand of tablets, and many LG and Samsung smart TVs.
Sadly, Amazon Prime Video is not available on Android TV at the time of writing, though that may change in future. There is a way to watch it on your favourite TV though; you can either Chromecast it from your computer (though the quality won’t be as good as it could be) or you can install a couple of apps from XDA Developers to watch it on any Android TV device (including the Nexus Player). The instructions are below:
- Head over to the XDA forums and download Prime Video Launcher.
- On your Android TV, open up Settings and visit the Security & Restrictions section. The first choice should be Unknown Sources. Turn it on. (Amazon Prime Video won’t run without this.)
- You can sideload the APK in another way if you prefer, but the easiest way is to use ES File Explorer. If you don’t have that on your Android TV, download it now and install it.
- Open up ES File Explorer and find a cloud or network service that you use. Dropbox works, Google Drive works, or (if you’re sneaky) you can probably use a USB stick instead. Find the Prime Video Launcher APK, and install it.
- Run it.
- You’ll be asked to confirm its installation, but moments later it’ll open. You’ll be asked if you want to install Amazon Prime VOD, which you need in order to actually watch anything. Confirm that you want to install the latest version and wait for the install to complete. In some cases it may fail to download and you’ll have to install it manually. Simply repeat this process, but sideload one of the VOD APKs found in this XDA forum thread.
- Once you’ve installed Amazon Prime VOD successfully, open it up and log into your Amazon account.
Voila. You should be able to watch Amazon Prime Video on your Android TV. Hopefully, and soon, Amazon will release a proper Android TV app so that we don’t have to jump through these hoops. Let us know if you’re able to give this a try! We’ve not tried it – yet – but we’ve read plenty to suggest it works just fine.
Will you be signing up to Amazon Prime Video?
