Can I Run iTunes on my Kindle? – Boulder Daily Camera

(Dave Taylor / For the Camera)

Q: I have a Kindle Fire HD, a great, low cost tablet that lets me apparently watch TV and movies in addition to just read books. And I have a bunch of movies and TV shows I’ve purchased on my AppleTV. Can I also watch them on my Kindle?

A: You would think that if you buy a movie in digital form on one platform that it would then be available to you on all your players and devices, right? Unfortunately, this is the beginning of the 21st Century, not the end, so at this point every content owner has its own protection system and is more worried about controlling distribution than giving you the ability to watch your content across various hardware platforms and delivery systems.

The protection systems are known as “DRM” systems, which stands for digital rights management, and they’re generally invisible if you have all devices from a single vendor and have them all logged in to the same account. So with your AppleTV, if you had an iPad and both devices were logged into the same iTunes account, you should be able to watch your movies and TV episodes on either device (albeit there might be some downloading from iCloud for it to work properly).

But wait, there’s more, because while it seems easy enough to reference the “Amazon Kindle” the fact is that there are two different classes of Kindle with two very different operating systems. The Kindle Paperwhite and other ebook readers using the eInk display technology (black and white, not color) run Kindle OS and they can’t really display much of anything that’s moving. They’re splendid ebook readers, but not so much for watching movies while on an airplane or in bed.

The Kindle Fire HD is a newer breed of Kindle, and they’re running a custom version of the popular Android operating system, originally from Google. Unless you have an older Kindle Fire which is running the earlier KindleOS from Amazon that isn’t Android, of course. If all you see is the “carousel” of book covers, you’re not on the Android based Fire OS.

You can access the Amazon Prime Video library through your Kindle Fire HD easily enough, but that’s the problem: Your iTunes purchase on your AppleTV doesn’t give you the license rights to also watch that movie on the Amazon platform, so you’d be out of luck.

And I haven’t even mentioned the problem of The Cloud when you might not be online 24×7. Want to download a movie you’ve purchased prior to boarding the plane to Sydney, Australia? That can be just about impossible to accomplish, a whole ‘nother proverbial kettle of fish…

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Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since 1980 and runs the popular Ask Dave Taylor electronics review and tech tutorial site. You can find him on Twitter as @DaveTaylor.