Several months ago, my husband Michael and I acquired a Sony Blu-Ray player.  One of the benefits of this player is that it works with Amazon’s streaming video.  I’ve had Amazon Prime for years, and haven’t yet had the opportunity to put their streaming video to work.

Five months ago, Michael made the ill-fated decision to try to actually set this up.  He entered his Amazon account details.  It didn’t work, and so he called Amazon tech support to try to figure out what’s going on.  They told him that since I’m the primary holder of the Amazon Prime account, it’s my account that needs to be associated with the player.  They walked him through the steps necessary to unregister his account from the player.  It didn’t take immediately, so they said to wait a bit for it to filter through the system.

The next day, his account was still registered on the player.  Thus begins tech support hell.  In the past five months, Michael has called Amazon and Sony multiple times.  Each of them says that it’s the other one’s fault.  At one point, a third-tier support tech from Sony was in contact with Michael for about a month.  That ultimately resulted in a conference call with engineers from both companies, wherein the tech from Amazon said that it would be fixed in a week.  That was three months ago.

Every once in awhile, Michael will try again.  His ticket is still open, and has new notes entered into it occasionally.  But neither Sony nor Amazon has bothered to contact us, it’s always been Michael calling to try to learn whether there’s been any movement.

This weekend, Michael called yet again to see if there was an update.  The tech on the phone was nice enough, and read through the most recent notes.  They’re still working on it, in short, and there’s no update as to when it might actually work.  After Michael hung up, he received an email from Amazon asking about his tech support experience.  He clicked on “no, this didn’t resolve my issue”, which resulted in this webpage:

I don’t think that we needed another example of the ineptitude of Amazon’s tech support.  It’s bad enough that this issue has been dragging on for five months.  But really, this link arrived from Amazon within ten minutes of the end of the call, and Michael was online and so noticed it and clicked on it immediately.  That’s one way to avoid getting negative feedback: pre-expire the links on your feedback emails.

We can’t get trade in our existing Blu-Ray player because his account is still somehow associated with the player.  No amount of unregistering it has worked, and both Sony and Amazon have supposedly reset it in their systems multiple times.  So we’re stuck with this player, unless we want to take the risk that someone will get access to Michael’s Amazon account through the player.

It’s been a pretty frustrating experience all around.  Thankfully, we’ve got our Netflix subscription working through our Xbox 360, and we’ve never had problems with it.  Too bad Sony and Amazon can’t work together as seamlessly as Netflix and Microsoft.