Now, it is an outright one.
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Furthermore, Amazon will also be offering its Prime membership as a monthly subscription for U.S. customers at $10.99, instead of the annual $99 fee that you pay to get Prime shipping service, Kindle Lending Library, and Amazon Music, among other things. Previously Amazon customers had to subscribe to Amazon Prime for $99 a year to access Amazon Prime Video, which includes movies, television shows and original Amazon programming.
At $8.99 a month, Amazon’s stand-alone streaming service is $1 less than Netflix’s standard membership and $1 more than Hulu.
Amazon’s Prime subscription used to be a yearly affair: pay $99 and get all the services for 12 months straight. The new service will pit Amazon against Netflix, who is raising its monthly prices to $9.99 in May.
According to CNN Money, Amazon will also offer the complete set of Prime services for $10.99 per month, which comes out to $131.88 per year.
Which streaming service do you use the most?
By stepping up pressure on Netflix with a stand-alone video subscription, Amazon is challenging not only a major competitor, but also a big cloud computing client, a sign of how all-encompassing the Seattle tech giant’s business has become. And if you’re still wary of commitment, all Amazon Prime plans offer a 30-day free trial. The cheapest plan costs $4.99 for one disc and a user can only request two DVD discs a month.
Offerings: Movies and past seasons of TV shows, such as “The Sopranos” and “Downton Abbey.’ Original programs include ‘Transparent, ‘ “Mozart in the Jungle” and ‘Catastrophe‘”. OTT refers to delivery of audio, video and other media over the Internet without the direct involvement of an Internet service provider. Now, Amazon is hitting us with some major news that’s making us seriously question our streaming service loyalty. “The incentive, however, is that the new monthly memberships can be canceled at any time”, the Times notes.
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Those who want to check it out can go to Amazon’s Prime website and click “See more plans”. And Amazon certainly spends a lot of time tracking what its users do with these new services.
