Here Comes Amazon Prime

I've had access to Amazon Prime for a while now, because my household pays the $79 yearly fee for the shipping discounts. The selection's okay, with a couple of significant offerings that Netflix and Hulu don't have, but the interface is a real pain in the neck, and most of the service is geared toward getting you to rent or buy other titles from Amazon’s streaming service. Most of the time I end up browsing through the Prime catalog through the Amazon site on my computer. Still, since content providers are so much friendlier with Amazon, there's always been a strong likelihood that Amazon Prime might become a significant competitor to Netflix and Hulu one day. That day just got a little closer, as Amazon has announced that it is now selling monthly subscriptions for Amazon Prime, priced at $7.99, exactly what Hulu and Netflix also charge.

So how does Amazon Prime stack up against its competitors? Aside from the issues I pointed out, very well at the moment. Prime's streaming selection is smaller than Netflix or Hulu's, but tends to have more new titles. There are no commercials, and I've never had any difficulty with the video quality. The yearly subscription fee won’t change, so if you sign up for the long term, the monthly cost is actually cheaper than Netflix and Hulu. Amazon also lets you buy and rent individual titles through its streaming service. If you want to watch something immediately and are willing to pay for it, there's no need to wait for the DVDs to show up in the mail. And of course there are the perks, which include a sizable library of free Kindle books and the free two-day shipping on most Amazon purchases. If you're a regular Amazon customer, Prime is a very good deal. However, it's not quite good enough to substitute for the other services, which is why I still use Hulu and Netflix even though I already pay for Prime.

Hulu's big advantage is that it has deals in place with almost all the major terrestrial networks to get their content almost immediately after it airs, and presents it for free for a couple of weeks. On Amazon, the same content shows up in the streaming service, but you have to purchase the individual episodes. I had a mild argument with the significant other a few days ago, when he was trying to watch CW’s "Arrow" through the Amazon site. "But it's on Hulu," I kept saying, when he mulled over paying $2 to stream the latest episode. We briefly debated over video quality, and putting up with the annoying Hulu advertisements, and the ability to watch the episodes on our flatscreen, something we can do with our Amazon content, but not with Hulu content yet. In the end, Hulu won. If you're trying to replace your television with a streaming service, it's much more expensive to use Amazon Prime to access current television shows. Paying to rent a measly four episodes of “Arrow” would have bought a full month of access to the entire Hulu Plus library.

Then there's Netflix. I have managed to find several films available for download on Amazon that I haven't been able to find anywhere else, like Roberto Rossellini's "Stromboli" with Ingrid Bergman. However, the overwhelming majority of the older classic films I like watching are available on DVD, and the bundled rental plan that Netflix offers is much more cost effective for me than renting titles individually through Amazon. Newer films especially are marked up to the point where if I want to see a new release before it becomes available on Netflix, I head for Redbox or even the lone remaining Blockbuster in town. I'm not a casual movie viewer who is content to just watch whatever's new on streaming, so selection is extremely important for me. And making me wait an extra month to rent "Moonrise Kingdom" from Redbox or Netflix still doesn't make me want to spend $4 to rent it from Amazon or Itunes.

For the less picky and demanding viewer, though, Amazon Prime is a perfectly good option, and I expect that it’s going to become an even better one now that Prime is being positioned as a real competitor in the streaming business. I fully expect that Amazon will start fixing some of those interface issues, add proper queuing and searching functions, and add some more titles to its library. And it’ll probably become much more popular as a result. One issue I hope they address soon is being able to buy subscriptions for other people, a problem I ran into last year when I tried getting my parents set up with a Prime account. I wasn’t getting them Prime for the streaming service, mind you, but for the free shipping. I still think that’s the best feature of Amazon Prime by a wide margin.
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