Getting Amazon Prime Video to work

I have taken out a free trial of Amazon Prime Video, but when I try to watch its streamed movies, I keep seeing an alert telling me that Microsoft Silverlight is not installed. My 24inch iMac (Early 2008) is running El Capitan and has 4GB of memory installed. Although I have installed Silverlight several times, I cannot make that alert disappear so that I can watch Amazon’s movie library. Does Amazon Prime Video not work on Macs yet?

Yes, it does, but many other Mac users have reported similar problems in getting it set up and running. You should ensure that you have downloaded and installed the very latest version of Silverlight, as OS X will now block some older versions because they suffer from known security vulnerabilities.

Microsoft provides test and demo pages where you can confirm that Silverlight has installed and is working properly, such as the page at bit.ly/23EzVGF.

With Silverlight installed and proven to be working, try accessing the Amazon Prime Video service using Safari rather than Firefox, as Safari is generally reported to be the more reliable of the two for this. If you can’t get Safari to work, you may find the only way to view Amazon’s movies is to download and install the latest release of Chrome, which does not require the Silverlight plugin. Because the video playback functionality that’s required is built into Google’s browser, this one often proves to be the most reliable option of all.

Amazon provides further instructions for dealing with issues with the Amazon Video service at amzn. to/1TRcuXU, which you may find helpful, including further Silverlight-specific troubleshooting.