Amazon today announced the launch of a new benefit for Amazon Prime members: unlimited, commercial-free, instant streaming of more than 5,000 movies and TV shows. This new benefit is being added at no additional cost — Prime membership will continue to be $79 per year.
“Millions of Amazon Prime members already enjoy the convenience of free Two-Day Shipping,” said Robbie Schwietzer, vice president of Amazon Prime, in the press release. “Adding unlimited instant access to thousands of movies and TV shows at no additional cost is a great way to give members even more value for their $79 annual Amazon Prime membership.”
Movies and TV shows included with an Amazon Prime membership can be watched instantly on Macs, PCs and nearly 200 models of Internet-connected TVs, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes that are compatible with Amazon Instant Video. The selection of videos available for instant streaming currently includes movies, such as “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” trilogy, “Amadeus,” “Syriana,” and “Chariots of Fire,” noted documentaries such as “Food Inc.,” “March of the Penguins” and “Ken Burns’ National Parks,” plus TV shows, such as “Doctor Who,” “Farscape,” “Fawlty Towers” and children’s shows, such as “Arthur,” “Caillou,” “Super Why!” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
Amazon Prime is a membership program that offers customers unlimited free Two-Day Shipping with no minimum purchase requirement for $79 a year. Millions of items are eligible, including books, home and garden products, electronics, video games, clothing, accessories and beauty products. With the introduction of Prime instant videos, free trial and paid Amazon Prime members in the U.S. now also have unlimited instant access to more than 5,000 videos.
Amazon Instant Video is a digital video service that offers customers more than 90,000 commercial-free movies and television shows to buy or rent on an a la carte basis. New-release movies are often available as soon as they are released on DVD, and many TV shows are available the day after their first broadcast. Amazon Instant Video also offers thousands of movies and TV shows in high definition. With Amazon Instant Video, customers can watch instantly on Macs, PCs, and nearly 200 Internet connected TVs, Blu-ray players, and set-top boxes. To learn more about Amazon Instant Video on your TV, visit www.amazon.com/watchontv.
“In addition to now offering unlimited, commercial-free, instant streaming of 5,000 movies and TV shows to Amazon Prime members, we continue to offer all customers more than 90,000 movies and TV shows through Amazon Instant Video,” said Cameron Janes, director of Amazon Instant Video, in the press release. “With Amazon Instant Video customers can rent or purchase hit movies, such as ‘The Social Network’ as well as purchase the latest TV shows available the day-after they broadcast.”
Customers who receive Prime shipping benefits through our Amazon Student and Amazon Mom programs can upgrade to receive paid Prime benefits for $79 a year.
For more information on Amazon Prime and Prime instant videos and to start an Amazon Prime free trial, visit www.amazon.com/primevideos.
For more information on Amazon Instant Video, visit www.amazon.com/instantvideo.
Source: Amazon.com, Inc.
Hope it comes to UK based members as well
So when will this, if ever, be available on my AppleTV…
…and in the fine print, I see that Adobe Flash Player is listed as a requirement. Sigh.
I don’t know about you but I fscking fell asleep in the middle of Syriana. What a load of tosh. And what happened to George Cloiney there? Must have piled on the pounds for that role.
What was the moral of the story of that film again? That some yahoo in Texas gets to control the succession of a sultanate in a Middle Eastern potentate and eliminates the good guy princeling in favor of the spineless suck up half brother who would do the bidding of the Texan?
See how well that scenario turned out in Libya. Why hasn’t that spineless Obama turfed out Gaddafi yet?
Anyway what the hell is Amazon offering that Netflix isn’t? Ok I never knew Amazon even had a movie rental service.
Echo the ATV2 request: Would love to see it on ATV2.
Very surprised that it isn’t available on PS3 yet either.
It is available on my Samsung TV, so I’ll try it this weekend.
Another great service that ignores the 10 to 20% of Americans who either need or simply prefer to watch television with closed captions. It’s not just for the deaf and hard-or-hearing. But captions are essential if you want to watch in either very noisy environments (subway cars, sports bars) or very quiet environments (your office cubicle).
My wife is deaf, and as much as we’d love to take advantage of Apple TV or Hulu or now Amazon Prime, caption delivery isn’t nearly as widespread as it needs to be.
Yeah, sadly Hulu and Netflix are the only major services that offer captions support. Netflix is actually increasing the amount of content that has captions at a very fast rate. If Amazon Prime ever started to offer content for their deaf and hard of hearing (like myself) customers, I’d use their service and never look back. It is the best streaming movie/tv service around hands down, just no captions.
So where is the list of content? Is this another Netfilx cluster$#@^? Pay a monthly subscription to sift through a catalog of 5000 titles of old crap that you’re either already seen or would never have any interest in watching? At least iTunes lets one browse through what’s available, for free!
I don’t know about you but I frigging fell asleep in the middle of Syriana. What a load of tosh. And what happened to George Clooney there? Must have piled on the pounds for that role.
What was the moral of the story of that film again? That some yahoo in Texas gets to control the succession of a sultanate in a Middle Eastern potentate and eliminates the good guy princeling in favor of the spineless suck up half brother who would do the bidding of the Texan?
See how well that scenario turned out in Libya. Why hasn’t that spineless Obama turfed out Gaddafi yet?
Anyway what the hell is Amazon offering that Netflix isn’t? Ok I never knew Amazon even had a movie rental service.
streaming is the future, so these compnaies might as well put all their effort into it and be done with dvd’s period. let them duke it out over the rights to offer new releases.
Hey thanks mdn for thinking us. Even though we sent you the link.
I was shocked that Netflix was on atv2. Not sure if amazon will be on atv2 or not. Very well could be. But right now they don’t have allot of titles. But to search just go at the top where you search for anything else and click on the dropsown menu click on video and then search.
It’s not Netflix or amazon that keeps you from having new releases. It’s the movie companies. The same ones that make you wait 28 days to get s new movie from redbox. I highly doubt we will see new releases for streaming anytime soon. Not till the movie companies get thief heads out of their butts.
Considering the service already existed, primarily as a way to get two-day shipping at no additional cost (and without forcing your order to exceed $25 to get slower free shipping), it seems like adding this totally unrelated benefit is value-added. Why are some people making disparaging comments?
Thanks Amazon… your smart move makes it more likely that I will sign up for Amazon Prime. I’ve considered it in the past, but did not think I made enough orders per year to justify the two-day shipping benefit.
Why only 5000 shows? Charge $10 bucks more and open it up to all the content..
Amazon Prime is worth it just for the shipping. I buy from them now more than ever… they are usually cheaper, I don’t have sales tax, and with $3.99 overnight shipping, it is just plain better. Combine all of that with their price check app, and it is killer… now if only they can get an app for iPad and added to AppleTV. Hopefully Apple will consider it, since they do it for Netflix already.
“Amazon Prime is worth it just for the shipping. I buy from them now more than ever…”
That’s exactly what they were hoping for.