The idealists here call it a mistake, violating various capitalist principles. The clever argument against Amazon is that they are betraying that they think the

The idealists here call it a mistake, violating various capitalist principles. The clever argument against Amazon is that they are betraying that they think their product is weak, and can't stand competition. The deeper, more pragmatic issue is that this is a browser war. The browsers are weird because they are TV dongles. Some hardware manufacturers want to give us browsers that only work for some sites. I pay Netflix $20/mo to synchronize some of their streams into my brain, through a complicated path involving a world-wide internet, LEDs, and my eye-balls. Why does the hardware path through which those bits flow have to matter? Netflix, Prime, HBO, Comedy Central - aren't all of these just sources of those stream? My question is whether all of this is because Prime won't support certain hardware paths, or because certain hardware won't support Prime. (Given what I know about Chromecast, I'd say it's the former).