Amazon has come a long, long way from the days of just making it easy to buy books. It's got a hand in everything . From online sales to cloud services to, yes, video.
If you have yet to try Amazon Video — also commonly referred to as Amazon Prime Video — you're absolutely missing out. For one, it's right up there with the likes of Apple and Google when it comes to a repository of films and television shows for rent or purchase. But Amazon goes even further. If you're an Amazon Prime member — and you really should be — you have access to a good bit of that content for free. As in, a whole lot of content. You could sit back with your $119 Prime membership and stream videos until the day you die and probably never see the same thing twice.
Yeah, it's that big.
Amazon Originals, and old favorites
That old show you loved years ago but wanted to catch up on on a rainy day? There's a good chance Amazon has it. (For me that's always been The West Wing .)
But Amazon Video doesn't stop there. Where things really get good are with all the original content. Some you've heard of. Some might be new. Consider:
- Absentia
- All or Nothing: A Season With the Arizona Cardinals
- All or Nothing: A Season With the Los Angeles Rams
- All or Nothing: The Dallas Cowboys
- All or Nothing: The Michigan Wolverines
- Alpha House
- American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story
- Betas
- Bosch
- Breathe
- Britannia
- Catastrophe
- Comrade Detective
- Crisis in Six Scenes
- Diablo Guardian
- Eat the World with Emeril Lagasse
- Fearless
- Fleabag
- Fortitude
- Goliath
- Good Girls Revolt
- Grand Prix Driver
- Hand of God
- I Love Dick
- Inside Edge
- Jean-Claude Van Johnson
- Julian Fellowes Presents Doctor Thorne
- Le Mans: Racing is Everything
- Long Strange Trip
- Lore
- Mozart in the Jungle
- One Mississippi
- Patriot
- Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams
- Picnic at Hanging Rock
- Red Oaks
- Sneaky Pete
- The Collection
- The Grand Tour
- The Last Post
- The Last Tycoon
- The Man in the High Castle
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- The New Yorker Presents
- The Remix
- The Tick
- Tin Star
- Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan
- Transparent
- You Are Wanted
- Z: The Beginning of Everything
That's a lot of really good stuff to watch. For free, so long as you're an Amazon Prime member.
Where can you watch Amazon Video?
You can get Amazon Video on pretty much any device. Phone, tablet, computer, wherever. But let's break it down a little further.
- Amazon Fire TV
- Android phones and tablets
- iPhone and iPad
- Apple TV
- Android TV
- Xbox
- PlayStation
- Roku
Put it this way: If you can't watch Amazon Video on it, you don't want it.
Tell me more about this Prime Membership thing
Amazon Prime is one of those things a company like Amazon can use to entice you to keep using Amazon and to keep talking about Amazon and to see Amazon in your sleep and ...
OK, here's the short, short version. For $119 a year it gets you free two-day shipping on a whole lot of things (but not everything) that you can buy through Amazon. In certain cities it gets you free same-day (or even within 2 hours) shipping. That's kind of crazy.
Then there's all the free streaming stuff. You get a lot of music for free via Amazon Music. You get a lot of video for free via Amazon Video. (Think of Amazon Prime Video as the free subset for members, then.)
Those are the big strokes, but they're by no means everything. Hit up this page for everything you get with Amazon Prime.
