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Amazon Prime Just Got Much More Valuable!

a logo for a amazon prime install

I’ve been a huge fan of Amazon Prime for year.  Free 2-day shipping has made my life much easier, and their recent introduction of free same-day shipping in many areas (including mine) is awesome.  As long as I order by noon, I can get an item delivered to me the same day for no extra shipping charge, as long as I spend $35.

But, to make things better, I saw this Tweet from a friend of mine yesterday:

Amazon Prime

I’ve always viewed Amazon Prime video as pretty useless for me, about the same as Netflix.  With all my travel I’m rarely in a place with great Wifi long enough to use streaming video.  When I’m home, my wife and I have hundreds of hours of TV that we need to catch up on.

But now, with the ability to download items and watch them on my own timeline.  In fact, this will likely cause me to kill my CBS All Access subscription for some of the older Survivor seasons.

Starting out, not all titles on Amazon Prime Video will be available for download.  They still need to work out deals with many of the producers of that content.  I did hear a rumor that Jack Bauer’s epic series “24” is part of the first wave, so I may be binge-watching that again.  😉

I’m guessing that much of the content geared towards children will be easier for Amazon to negotiate download rights to as opposed to feature films from big studios.  That’s especially helpful for families when traveling with kids.  The service will be available for download on the majority of popular devices:

  • Most Amazon Fire tablets
  • The Amazon Fire phone
  • Android devices
  • iOS devices (iPhone and iPad)

I suspect it will take some time before most of the material is available to download.  And, the Amazon website has some indications that there will be (predictably) limits on the amount of items you can download at one time and how long you have to watch them.  I have no issues with those sorts of restrictions, since offline access is such a huge plus.

Amazon offers 30-day free trials of Amazon Prime, which also now means you get a month of free Prime Instant Video to download.

If you haven’t signed up yet, give it a try.  I do earn a small referral credit if you sign up for Amazon prime.  Between the free 2-day (and, in some cases, same day) shipping and free video, I view this as a complete no-brainer for me.

6 Comments

  1. i travel in europe half the year and have just discovered i cannot stream anything amazon prime on my ipad outside the usa, even using a VPN. it detects the vpn, instructs me to remove the vpn filter in my settings, then when i do so and go back to reload the video it says not available in your country . 🙁

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