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Watch Out Netflix, Amazon Streaming Video to Prime Users
ageoffri writes "Amazon has announced that they will include streaming with a subscription to Amazon Prime. The free 2 day shipping on a huge selection of products either sold directly by Amazon or fulfilled by Amazon is already worth the Prime cost. Now add in streaming that works out to just under $7/month and it gets better. Sure the selection isn't that great yet but this has the ability to really change the streaming market!"
So it's basically Netflix, with the exact same shortcomings of Netflix. I'd gladly pay at least twice what Netflix currently charges for streaming if I could get their entire collection that way. Unfortunately, the content providers haven't yet pulled their heads out of their asses and figured out that digital distribution is the future, so we're still stuck waiting for DVDs in the mail for most reasonably modern and/or highly rated content.
As digital distribution becomes more ubiquitous, more and more people will turn to piracy unless the content providers start allowing more of their stuff to be streamed legally. Hopefully they'll figure that out instead of fighting streaming every step of the way.
Not only works in Linux, but it works *well* in Linux.
Netflix can eat it.
Why bundle this with Amazon Prime? Why not just make it a separate subscription service? It feels like the equivalent of bundling a haircut with a tech support service subscription for a Linux distro.
While the library is small they give it away. Once they get a respectable library of titles they'll have a bunch of people who are using it to start charging while they claim "We never said it would be free for ever. You can't complain about something you were getting for free." Base on the amount of users they'll be able to measure what their monthly fee will be (the more popular it is the more they'll charge - up to the amount Nerflix charges - with a discount to Prime users).