Entertainment

Amazon Prime or Netflix – can Amazon Dethrone the King of Streaming?

Recently I purchased an Amazon Prime account to go along with the Amazon Fire TV that I bought for Christmas. Initially I was unsure as to whether the £39 a year for Prime (it was half price thanks to having a student account) was worth the money and whether I’d regret spending the money and just end up watching the Netflix content I was paying $8.99 a month for anyway. However, I ended up being pleasantly surprised to find plenty of content to watch and even some content that couldn’t be found on the British version of Netflix.

To compare the two doesn’t seem fair and right now I will tell you Netflix is arguably the better service as it offers a much bigger community. Nonetheless, what I intend to do with this post is show people that for £79 a year (roughly $6.55 which includes your next-day Prime delivery too) you can get a service that is plenty capable and even in some areas outperforms the biggest streaming service on the planet.

AMERICAN CONTENT IS OFFERED INTERNATIONALLY

Recently Netflix has been having problems with a lot of British users using a Chrome extension that allows them to watch content that only the American Netflix offers. Obviously you can bring into question whether it wouldn’t just make more sense for the companies to all just allow all content internationally as this would allow all users to watch all content and stop people trying to make a work around. However, what Amazon offers with their Amazon Prime content, they offer to every nation that can access the site. This means that such shows like Arrow and The Walking Dead, two massive shows that are aired in the UK but only accessible to American Netflix users, can be viewed on Amazon Prime.

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Now, with this there are some set backs; for example, you can only watch half as many season of The Walking Dead as you can on Netflix and the seasons are likely to come a lot later to Prime. However, for UK users I’m sure this is something they’re content to agree to, rather than risk their Netflix account getting banned for attempting to access the US Netflix.

QUALITY AMAZON ORIGINALS

One thing that Netflix has been highlighting recently with it’s release of Better Call Saul and upcoming release of Daredevil is there power for making quality original content. Obviously we’ve seen massive hits such as House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. Well recently Amazon have been getting in on the award-winning content with a show called Transparent which was nominated for and won 2 golden globes. Having not seen Transparent myself, the rave reviews intrigue me. IMDB’s synopsis is “An LA family with serious boundary issues have their past and future unravel when a dramatic admission causes everyone’s secrets to spill out.”.amazon-prime-or-netflix

Another quality show from Amazon Prime is the more obscure Mozart in the Jungle which appears to be more of a musical TV Series which iMDB describes as “Sex, drugs and classical music illustrate what happens behind the curtains at the symphony can be just as captivating as what occurs on stage.” It’s a show that received rave reviews with an average iMDB score of 8.3 and a Rotten Tomatoes score of 95%, two highly respectable ratings.

In addition, Amazon have just announced that they will be producing original content for cinemas that will then come to Prime users far earlier than DVD release and release to the rest of the public which is always another incentive. Obviously this relies on the content itself being good and getting a big enough name and audience to pull people towards wanting the content earlier!

EXCLUSIVE DEALS

Anybody who is anybody has heard of Amazon, from those who use it to buy everything to those who may have just heard about it because everybody else is using it, there is no doubting that Amazon has massive power on the internet and therefore assumedly has massive financial backing in whatever area they want to venture. Amazon have used this power to secure some quality exclusive content to their Prime service.amazon-prime-or-netflix

Some big names that you can find exclusively on Amazon Prime are: Downton Abbey, Constantine, Suits, Jersey Shore, Django Unchained, 12 Years a Slave, Life of Pi and many more coming every day. Amazon are pushing against Netflix and when it comes to power and wealth, can evenly mach them and maybe even better them. Obviously right now Netflix has a massive pull and is by far the biggest streaming service in the world and has become a part of our culture and especially my culture as a student. But it’ll be exciting to see how each company fights for exclusive content.

SOME SERIOUS TITLES AVAILABLE

Now you may never have heard of Amazon Prime Instant Video and as a result, having heard of it now you may think they don’t have many big name titles to offer you right now. As you can see with the exclusives above, they have some fairly decent titles that can’t get on Netflix. However, there are many more titles that will draw in audience of all ages and walks of life.amazon-rime-or-netflix

Once again, here is a list of some of the biggest names on the Amazon Prime Instant Video List: World War Z, Walking Dead, Arrow, SkyFall, Hunger Games, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Wolf of Wall Street, Anchorman 2, Orphan Black, Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, 12 Years A Slave, Monsters Inc, Django, Pitch Perfect, Cars 1 & 2, Rush and many many more!

As you can see from this list, Amazon Prime has plenty of content for everyone. I’ve found with my time using it that it’s especially good for kids programmes as it features a lot of Disney content such as Monsters Inc, Cars , Toy Story 3 and such. However, there are top quality titles in every genre you can think of.

SUMMARY

Amazon prime has really impressed me over my past couple of months using it and has provided me, my girlfriend, my family and her family with plenty of content to watch. There’s movies for a night in, there’s TV Shows to binge watch on days off from Uni, there’s plenty there.

What is most exciting is that Amazon doesn’t appear to be slowing down with the content either. Every week or so they update their Prime offerings with new shows and films and there’s always at least one AAA film on the list that I add to my watch list to watch at a later date. On top of that, Prime has gotten me into watching plenty of brilliant TV Shows such as Arrow, The Walking Dead, Lost and some more that I’ve found from my childhood that I won’t mention out of fear of embarrassing myself!

How i’d sum up this article would be to say this: if you’ve either been thinking about getting Prime delivery for a while I believe this will tip you over the edge; or if you’ve had Prime and never looked at the video content, I’d definitely recommend it!

You can sign up for Amazon Prime here

You can sign up for Netflix here

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