- Today, I'm gonna sing the praises of a,
well, not an unsung hero,
but maybe an undersung hero of streaming?
And that's Prime Video,
which might sound a little bit weird, right?
It's Prime Video.
Everybody knows Prime Video,
but I do think it gets left out
of conversations quite a bit, even on this channel,
maybe especially on this channel,
because it's hard to categorize
with other streaming services.
And we'll talk about why.
So today I'm gonna go over five of the reasons
that I love Prime Video and why, frankly,
maybe it should take over as your daily streaming driver.
Now it's not all sunshine and roses.
I also have something that they desperately need
to get a little bit better,
but I'll wait for the end of the video to talk about that.
All right, let's dive in.
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All right, let's talk about Prime.
Now, like I said at the top,
it might sound a little bit weird
that I say that it's an unsung
or undersung hero in streaming,
but here's what I mean by that.
Prime Video is very difficult to compare
to other streaming services,
simply because it's structured differently.
It comes with Prime, right?
Amazon Prime, you get it for the free shipping
and hey, here's a streaming service on top of that, great.
For that reason, I think it's a little bit
different than something like Netflix
where you pay them a set amount of money,
these days, an exorbitant amount of money,
and you get the streaming service.
But it's tougher to compare the pricing
the value between something like that
and something like Prime Video,
where there are so many other things
that come along with it.
But here in lies the first thing
that I love so much about Prime Video,
and that's the value.
Amazon Prime as an umbrella service
will cost you $140 a year.
So you're getting the free shipping.
You're getting the music, you're getting the photos,
you're getting whatever, including the streaming service.
So 140 bucks a year works out to, what,
little less than 12 bucks a month.
Honestly, compared to a lot of streaming services
just by themselves, not bad.
Now, if you don't have Prime Video
and you just want to look
into the streaming service, no problem.
You can get that for nine bucks a month.
Now let that number sink in for a moment.
Okay, nine bucks a month.
Yeah, it's a little bit more than something like Disney+,
but it's quite a bit less
than the standard Netflix subscription.
It's less than you would pay
for the commercial supported version of HBO Max,
let alone the non-commercial supported version of it.
Over on Hulu, you can get that for a little bit less,
but you're gonna have to watch commercials.
If you wanna go with no commercials,
you're gonna pay more.
Anyway, point being that Prime Video
is actually a really good deal.
Just if we look at pricing across different services,
but it's not just about price, of course,
why is it such a good deal?
It's because of the content.
They have incredible content.
They've got an amazing breadth of content.
They've got excellent originals.
Okay, right now everybody's talking about "The Boys,"
but it's not just that.
They've got the "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,"
"Fleabag," "The Expanse," "The Wheel of Time,"
really something for everybody.
I could go on and on and on and on.
The Prime Video Originals game
is picking up quite a bit in the last few years
and it's looking really good.
We haven't even gotten to the "Lord of the Rings" show
that's supposed to come out later this year.
I mean, we'll see how it goes,
but presumably should at least look really good.
And outside of their Originals,
they've got sports content now.
They do events, live events,
and they still do really well
at licensing other studio's content as well.
So you're gonna get a huge breadth of content,
whether it's brand new, whether it's made
by Prime Video or whether it's from an outside studio.
One of my favorite things about the Prime Video library
is how much awful schlocky B movie content they have.
If that's something that you're into,
you know, maybe the mood strikes you
and you wanna watch something kind of terrible,
but so bad it's good.
Prime Video has a ton of that stuff.
And not only is it good content,
but it looks good as well.
Prime Video actually does a really good job
of getting a lot of their titles out there in 4K HDR.
Now, obviously, that's gonna require
that you've got a TV and a streaming device
that supports that.
But if you do, that 4K and especially
the HDR designation is huge.
And these days you would think that,
"Hey, everything's gonna be put out
in that kind of quality, right?"
Well, not so much other streaming services
do have titles in 4K HDR,
but from my experience, there are gonna be a lot more
of those when you're browsing around
on Prime Video than on the others.
Reason number four is actually something
that is unique to Prime Video.
And I absolutely love it.
And it's called X-Ray.
If you've used Prime Video recently,
then you know what I'm talking about.
This has been around for a while.
I'm not saying it's new,
but you may not have noticed it
if it's been a while since you logged into Prime Video
and actually used it.
X-Ray is a feature that pops up
when you pause your content, okay?
So you press pause.
It'll tell you who's in that scene,
who the actors are that are playing which characters.
It'll give you a little trivia.
What's the music that's playing,
that sort of thing will come up with X-Ray.
Honestly, I don't know
if they've got that patented or something,
but it seems like everybody should be doing that.
It's a little bit weird to me
that Prime Video is the only one that does.
It's really great.
The last thing I wanna bring up
on my good list here is the interface.
Now the interface is also gonna be the bad item
that we'll get to in just a moment,
but here's what I mean on the good list.
Prime Video used to be notorious for mish-mashing
all of their content into a lot of different categories.
So you never knew if you were getting something
that was free or if you clicked on it,
if it was gonna say you gotta rent this.
So free and paid would intermingle freely
or back in the days when it was IMDb TV,
now it's Freevee, but back in those days,
you didn't know really if you were gonna get something
that was based on that.
So you had to watch commercials
or if it was actually Prime Video content.
So there was a lot of intermingling in their menus.
That has been cleaned up a lot.
Thank goodness.
Now it's much easier to tell if something is free,
if it comes with Prime, if it's paid content
that you're gonna have to rent or buy,
Freevee, formerly IMDb TV,
now has its own category so that it's not intermingled
with the rest of the stuff.
So in that way, they've done a much better job
than in years past at cleaning up that interface.
Unfortunately, we do need to talk
about the interface as the thing that I wish
that they would continue to clean up a little bit more.
Obviously, they've done a lot of work already.
That's great, but I do think
there's a little work yet to be done.
The home screen has so much content,
so much different stuff competing for your attention
that it gets a little bit hairy.
You can kinda lock up.
The way that we used to talk about,
you scroll through Netflix for 45 minutes
and that was your entertainment,
looking at things that you could potentially watch.
I feel like that's even worse on Prime Video
where something about the layout,
something about the way
that they're stacking all these things together,
makes it kind of chaotic and tough to decide what to watch.
You've got sports content, you've got live events,
you've got all the different categories
of free with prime, Freevee,
external channels showing up with content there.
It gets to be a bit much.
Luckily, you can go up to the top of the screen
and then click over to Categories
and you'll have a little nicer tile layout
that you can use to find what you're looking for
if you have a genre in mind,
but that kind of ease of use
does not carry over very well into say the home menu.
So is Prime Video perfect?
No, of course not.
They've got a lot to work on.
In fact, I'd like to hear if you have any frustrations
with it, hit the comments below.
If there's anything that I didn't talk
about that you don't really care for,
but for the most part, honestly,
I really, really like it.
It's gonna give HBO Max a run
for its money as my daily driver.
That's usually the one I click into first
before I start browsing on other streaming services.
But these days, honestly,
Prime Videos looking to nab that spot.
They just might do it.
All right, everybody, thanks for watching.
Again, don't forget to join me
Fridays at 2:00 PM Eastern for the livestream
that I do on this channel.
We're talking about streaming issues
for an hour every week,
would love to have your participation there.
Thanks for watching today.
And I will see you next time.