Amazon announced that it is making Amazon Prime membership available as a monthly subscription as well as the standard annual subscription. It is also now offering Amazon Prime Video as a standalone service to go head-to-head with Netflix and other streaming content providers. If you’re only going to choose one, there are a lot of reasons to choose Amazon.
The Netflix plan that offers the most direct “apples to apples” comparison to the standalone Amazon Prime Video service is the Standard plan at $9.99 per month. For another dollar, though, you can subscribe to the full Amazon Prime service for $10.99 a month–which includes the Amazon Prime Video service, plus free 2-day shipping on eligible products, Amazon Prime Music, and more. In other words, for about the same money you’d spend on Netflix, you can get the equivalent of Netflix plus a broad array of additional perks and benefits.
Amazon is going head-to-head with Netflix and other streaming services with the announcement of a new video-only monthly subscription option for Amazon Prime . The move makes Amazon Prime Video more appealing to a broader range of customer who may not be interested in paying for Amazon Prime just to get access to the streaming video content. It also makes it increasingly more expensive to cut the cord from traditional cable and still have access to a broad range of shows and content.
New Amazon Prime Plans
There are actually two new services from Amazon. One offers a monthly subscription to the complete Amazon Prime membership—with all of its associated perks and benefits, including free 2-day shipping on Primer eligible items, Amazon Prime Music, and Amazon Prime Video. The net per year works out to $32.88 more than the $99 annual subscription, but make Amazon Prime more accessible to customers that can rationalize $10.99 a month, but don’t want to spend $99 at one time for Amazon Prime.
The second option is the video-only option for $8.99 per month. For $8.99 per month, customers can choose to subscribe to just Amazon Prime Video—which is a direct competitor to Netflix. Like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video has a diverse collection of movies and TV shows, new releases, and even original shows that can only be found on Amazon, like Transparent and Catastrophe.
I would argue that it’s silly to bother paying $8.99 per month for just Amazon Prime Video when you can get all of Amazon Prime for just $2 a month more—and I am sure Amazon is banking on customers using that same logic. Amazon Prime Video is pretty great, but that extra $2 gets you a ton of additional benefits.
Cutting the Cord
Services like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix allow consumers to have more options when it comes to watching TV and movies. There is a growing movement to rebel against the bloat of traditional cable TV services—and the model of paying exorbitant amounts of money for packages with hundreds of channels you don’t care about just so you can access the seven or eight channels you actually watch. Live sports and local channels are still a question mark, but for the most part these services do allow consumers to re-think how they pay for and watch video content.
See the full article on Forbes: Amazon Standalone Video Streaming Adds To Growing Complexity Of Cutting The Cord.
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