Doing the right thing

Amazon.com just did a very admirable thing — they admitted they had possibly mis-represented the actual quality of video delivered to me (not that I noticed or actually even cared), and they gave me a credit.

Hello,

As someone who has purchased digital movies or TV shows in high-definition (HD) from Amazon Instant Video, we wanted to provide you more information about how we deliver HD content. It is our goal to provide you an uninterrupted viewing experience without any video reloading or "buffering." To provide you uninterrupted viewing we may lower the resolution of HD videos to standard definition during streaming playback. We do this if we detect that your Internet connection to our service may not be fast enough to support HD playback. For more information on viewing HD videos from Amazon Instant Video, please visit our Help page here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200256920

Because you may not have been able to playback one of your rentals or purchases in HD quality, we have issued you a one-time Amazon Instant Video credit of $1 for each of the HD movies and TV episodes you have purchased from us for a total amount of $4. In order to apply the credit to your Amazon Instant Video account, please click here, http://www.amazon.com/instantvideo/hdcredit or copy the following link in your browser and follow the online instructions:

http://www.amazon.com/instantvideo/hdcredit

Once your credit of $4 has been successfully added to your account, it will be automatically applied to your future eligible purchases from Amazon Instant Video. Your credit will expire on May 3, 2012.

Thank you for using our service,

The Amazon Instant Video Team 

That’s truly remarkable.  Hats off to Amazon for doing the right thing.  It’s a lesson to all of us.

Alex Eckelberry