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Primecast is Dead after a 36-Hour Run of Super Popularity

Sometimes, good things are for a lifetime, and other times they are for a few days.  Primecast is one of the latter things.  Primecast, for those that don’t know of the app, was an app that let Amazon Instant Video subscribers stream their video to Chromecast.  What’s the big deal?  Well, there is no current way to get your Instant Video to a television except to have your computer hooked up to it (and use it as the display, which is ridiculous) or buy a hundred-dollar Fire TV and stream from that.  That’s just not cool, until Primecast hit the Play Store a few days ago.

Primecast was a nifty app that, from a single link on one page within Reddit, expanded to be covered by most online media, including us here at Android Headlines.  It was stupendously popular, and the developers were overjoyed with the public praise and popularity of the app that they thought was just a cool idea.  The app cost $3 USD.  Notice past tense here.  This is why we bring Primecast up: it’s dead and removed from the Play Store.

The issue with being the link between two huge companies and their products and services is just that: there are two huge companies on either end of your product.  And that’s what Primecast’s developer faced: crippling moves by either Google or Amazon to stop their app dead, and it worked.  Now, we didn’t know exactly why the app was removed, or how or why it stopped working altogether.  The developers initially just posted an apology on the app’s official website saying that the app was pulled, by them, from the Play Store.  But now, we have a little more to share about the incident and why the app stopped working.

We know, courtesy of Android Police, that the developers got locked out or the streaming functionality of the app.  The streaming functionality could have been locked a variety of ways, so let’s look at those.  Amazon themselves could have done something on their end to lock out the streamability of their video content.  The Primecast’s ability to use the streaming API from Amazon could have been revoked, making the app entirely useless.  All we know is that a great app is dead and (as it seems right now) not likely to come back sometime soon.

Good news is that the developers, in the post on their website, said “What we do know however is that we would love to continue providing you with great software and a great experience”, so that could mean new apps that are allowed to succeed and benefit users for more than the 36 hours that Primecast was functional.  Did you pick Primecast up and try it?  How was it, and was it something that you felt was missing in the Amazon ecosystem, for connectivity?  If you didn’t pick it up, would you if you could now?  All we know is that Primecast is dead and the Fire TV will not sell any better because of that.  Which kind of linking or nifty features or apps do you think that the Primecast developers will attempt next?  Let us know down below.