Lets talk about prime video by Amazon or popularly known as Amazon Video, One of the main reasons why Amazon video is unique is because it is bundled with Amazon prime services on its e-commerce platform which provides priority delivery and exclusive offers on selected product catalogue at Amazon stores worldwide. Amazon is a global leader in e-commerce and merging their video streaming service with their e-commerce store is a masterstroke.
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Amazon video service is available on a yearly subscription basis and here in India it’s available for Rs 999 per year. The price at which Amazon video service is available is very very competitive, if we look at the immediate competition which is “Netflix”, they charge a minimum of Rs 500 to Rs 800 per month , which is many many times higher than what Amazon video service is charging.
Amazon video service sweetens the deal with bundled amazon prime e-commerce store subscription and we must also point out that, if you happen to buy amazon devices like the amazon eco speakers or the amazon fire stick (the chromecast like device) then there’s a big chance that one year amazon prime subscription will be free for you.
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Amazon video is relatively well known for original programming, and it comes a close second to global leader Netflix in original programming, Shows like “the grand tour” , “hand of god” and “fear the walking dead” makes a compelling list of amazon original series, but barring a few, Amazon original series are not as widely popular as Netflix original series.
However, original series are not its strong point, Amazon video really shines in 3rd party programming, they have rights to some of the biggest tv series and movies of the reacent times Widely popular comedy shows like “two and a half men”, “two broke girls” and crime thrillers like “dexter”, “person of interest” or the good wife or if you are into supernatural tv kind then you have “supernatural” “constantin”, “the originals” and many more.
On the movies front, if you are into Bollywood movies both new and old ones, then this is the right place for you, Bollywood classics like “darr”, “agneepath” (the old one) , “dostana” (the old and new both) are available and quite frankly many new Bollywood movies have there digital premier on Amazon video service these days.
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Incase of Hollywood movies, its a long list as well, starting from the complete Harry Potter series to the latest “triple x” series, from widely acclaimed tom hanks movie “da Vinci code” to the recently released and critically acclaimed “deep water horizon”, all these movies are available in the Amazon video service.
AND the most unique feature of the Amazon video service is the ability to change language of a limited catalogue of movies, You can do it on the fly, which means ,you can choose to watch half of a move in English and then half of the same movie in Hindi, Tamil, telegu or Marathi (Provided the dubbed versions are available), nevertheless this is a very very unique feature to have, and you guyz should try it out.
Finally content wise, while we understand that no streaming service will be able to provide all movies or Tv services in one platform, it all depends on the variety and range of the content catalogue, and looking at the current content catalogue of this service , its bound to keep you busy for a long period of time.
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The primary ways to access Amazon video service is through the Mobile app or PC browser or Amazon Fire stick, surprisingly it dosent support google chromecast and this is the only sore point on the shining star that is “Amazon video service”
Talking about accessibility, one thing that the Amazon video service does very well is the content “playback resume” service, suppose you are watching a show on your favourite device and you pause, you can resume from the exact same point from any other device running with the same amazon prime id, lots of the competing service are really bad at doing this, services like Hotstar is very bad at playback resume service , most of the time hotstar will re-start the content from the begining.
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The Amazon video service app on mobiles, consoles and the web browser provides three types of Video quality settings,
Good: It consumes around 400 mb of data per hour, this mode is quite OK if you are watching on a small screen and you have a very very limited data plan which is very unlikely considering “Jio Days” we live in, you can just discard this option,
Better: It consumes around 1.4 GB per hour, this mode is the most popular mode, the video quality is good and it is watchable in any large screen like a Laptop or Televisions as well.
Best: This Option will consume about 6GB of data per hour, and it requires a real high end broadband connection, we believe 6 GB is a bit too high for a HD video streaming service, with the kind of compression technology available these days, we believe data consumption of 6GB per hour is on the higher side,
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Amazon video service is definitely a very Competitive and Compelling service.
Competitive: Because of the Price point at which the service is available along with additional benefits of amazon e-commerce services.
and
Compelling because of the high quality content catalogue available with them.
The only pain point is the NON support of google chrome-cast streaming device and because of which we had to deduct 1 point.
Our rating for Amazon video service is 8.5/10.
