Use the Photon App to Watch Amazon Instant Video on iPad

Amazon Prime customers such as myself can watch numerous Amazon Prime Instant Video titles for free. As a semi-old fogey, I just watched an episode of the fairly recent Doctor Who revival (with Christopher Eccleston as "The Doctor") and one of the original Star Trek series ... and I did it all on my iPad!

That's quite a feat, since Amazon Instant Videos use Adobe Flash technology, and the iPad doesn't support Flash.

The secret is Photon. The Photon Flash Web browser app for iPad ($4.99; icon at left) is an alternative browser that you can use on the iPad. You can use Safari most of the time, that is, but fire up Photon when you need to watch a Flash video. Or you can just use Photon as your main iPad browser, since it is a full-featured web browser.

There is also a Photon Flash Web browser app for iPhone that costs $3.99. It does the same kinds of things as the $4.99 iPad version, but it is iPhone-specific. It runs on the iPad, as well, but does not take advantage of the larger screen (for instance, no tabbed web pages). These two versions are very hard to tell apart at the App Store; be careful to get the one you want for the device you have. Remember: the iPad version does not run on an iPhone, while the iPhone version does run on an iPad, but does not use the larger iPad screen to best advantage.

Photon uses a neat workaround. When you watch a Flash video, it diverts the containing web page to its own web server, somewhere out there in the cloud. Then, working on the fly, it converts the Flash-based source video stream referenced in the web page into a video format the iPad can use, and it inserts the converted stream into a modified version of the original web page. Then it sends the modified web page out to the iPad. The converted video is thereby the one you see in Photon.

Will Photon let you play a Flash-dependent, interactive online game, by the way? I don't know. I haven't tried it. But I suspect it imposes unacceptably slow lag times, and that Photon's Flash compatibility is best reserved for streaming video.

Here's an iPad screen snap of an Upstairs, Downstairs episode that I paused in Photon:

I accessed the episode using Photon in its "normal" — i.e., not Flash-enabled — mode:

The presence of the "lightning" icon at upper right indicates that Photon is operating in its "normal" mode. My next move would normally be to touch the green "Watch now $0.00" button, but if I don't touch the "lightning" icon first, I see:

The "Flash player is not installed" message alerts me to touch the "lightning" icon, and I briefly see:

The "Connecting to streaming session for browsing Flash websites" overlay appears only temporarily, and then I see:

It looks almost like the screen shot I showed earlier in this post, three images above this one. But now the set of icons at upper right has changed from:

Not Flash-enabled.

To:

Flash-enabled. To enable Flash, I touched the "lightning" icon
shown in the previous image.

If I were now to tap the third icon from the right, by the way, I would go back to Photon's "normal," non-Flash-enabled mode.

The Amazon Instant Video player has various controls arrayed at bottom right (also see the first image in this post):

These controls disappear after a few seconds of screen inactivity,
but if you tap the video image on the screen, they reappear.

One of the drawbacks of the way Photon supports Flash is that the Adjust volume, Pop out, and Full screen controls are often hard to use and in some cases don't seem to work right at all. One of the problems is that there is considerable lag time between when I tap the screen and when the tap produces a result.

For example, it's very hard to adjust the volume. The workaround is to switch from Photon's "touch mode":

This is "touch mode." The "fingertip" icon is selected.

To its "pointer mode":

This is "pointer mode." The "arrow" icon has been selected.

Now I can drag my physical fingertip across the iPad screen to manually place an arrow cursor at the rightmost end of the volume slider:

Then, after I tap the screen once, the volume slider responds normally:

As for Amazon's Full screen control ...

... it gives weird results that I'm not going to reproduce here. I don't know how to use it to give a proper full-screen view of the video. I recommend not using it in Photon on the iPad.

Amazon's Pop out control in intended to play the video in a popup window, when used with a regular computer browser. In Photon for the iPad it enlarges the video within the original browser tab:

But, annoyingly, the controls at the bottom are partly obscured. Even if they weren't, they provide no way to pop the video back into its usual player. One way to do that is to pause playback by touching the (partially obscured) Pause button at lower left, then hit the Back arrow at upper left. The video will then show up (paused) in its regular player, and will take up where I left off if I hit the Play button at lower left.

If I use Pop out and then I touch the rightmost icon ...

... to expand Photon itself into full screen mode, then I actually get a full screen image:

I can tap the "expand" icon again (shown at upper right in the image above) to go back to ordinary not-popped-out mode.

Now, something that's really annoying:

This is what happens sometimes for no discernible reason. "Online Viewing Limit Reached" supposedly happens when you are trying to watch more than two videos at a time across all your devices — iPads, iPhones, computers, etc. But I've been getting it when I'm just trying to watch one video on one device, my iPad, using Photon.

Alas, hitting "Retry" never works to clear up the problem.

I suspect the problem must have to do with how Photon buffers the original video stream that it pulls over from Amazon's servers to its own servers. Something gets out of sync, and Amazon thinks I'm trying to access more than two copies of the stream.

I have tried every conceivable thing to get things working again, with no consistent success. Closing out the Flash-enabled session, closing Photon's tab for that session, going back to Amazon's home page and drilling down all over again to the video, exiting the Photon app, restarting the iPad — none of these seem to work.

However, the problem does seem to go away if I wait a few minutes and try again. Maybe the out-of-sync session between Photon and Amazon simply times out. I have no idea, really, what's going on.

I expect the developers of Photon will in some future release fix this and the other problems I've mentioned. Meanwhile, I have to say that it's extremely nice to be able to use Photon to play Flash-based streaming videos from Amazon Instant Video on my iPad!