Amazon Instant Video Now Lets Customers View Personal Photos And Videos From Cloud Drive

Amazon is putting its Dropbox and Google Drive competitor, Amazon Cloud Drive, somewhere consumers will be more likely to access it. The company announced this morning that Amazon Cloud Drive will now be available on the Amazon Instant Video application, meaning customers can now play their personal videos and view their photos on supported devices.

Unfortunately, those devices today only include the PlayStation 3 and 4 and select LG and Samsung TVs (2012-2014) across the U.S., U.K. and Germany. Amazon VP of Digital Video, Michael Paull, in a statement, noted that’s just a start, however, and that Amazon is “looking forward to delivering this feature to even more devices in the future.”

On these select devices that are first to receive Cloud Drive’s integration into Amazon Instant Video, there will be a new section within the app where users can establish the Cloud Drive connection. And new customers can download the Amazon Instant Video app, creating their Amazon account during the sign-in process.

While obviously, it makes sense to initially introduce the functionality to the big screen so you can watch home movies in the living room, it would be great to see this same integration arrive on smaller screens, too, like the Fire tablets, iPad or other Android tablets. After all, a lot of photo and video viewing takes place on these devices as well. (Of course, customers could always just open up the content in the Cloud Drive app itself, but it’s handy to have everything in one spot.)

It’s unclear at this time if there are any limitations on the file formats or the length of the “personal videos” the Instant Video App will play in order to limit its usage to home movies versus actual movies you may have copied off of DVDs you owned (or acquired, ahem, elsewhere). Amazon Instant Video’s help documentation doesn’t exactly detail the technical requirements, either, so we reached out for an official response.