Amazon Prime Movies
Amazon Prime Movies (aka Prime Instant Videos), are just one of the great benefits you get from becoming an Amazon Prime member in the United States.
Prime Instant Videos is a similar service to Amazon Instant Videos, but with a few crucial differences, the main one being that they are free to Amazon Prime members.
Apart from that, another main difference with the Amazon Prime video on demand service is that you can only stream movies via your web browser (i.e. you cannot download them to compatible devices, such as a Kindle Fire).
It’s also important to realise that not all movies and TV shows are available through the Amazon Prime movie facility. There are already thousands of shows for you to watch, and more are being added all the time, but you shouldn’t expect to find the latest Hollywood blockbuster being made available the instant the movie hits the theaters.
So, how do you get access to all these free movies and shows?
Well, firstly, if you go to the Amazon.com home page, you should:
- Move your mouse over the Shop by Department box near the top left of the screen.
- When the list of departments appears, move your mouse over the first entry, which reads Unlimited Instant Videos.
- When the list of sub-departments appears, click the first entry, that says Prime Instant Videos, as per the following screenshot.
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This will take you to the Prime Instant Videos page, which will look something like this:
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From there, you can browse the movies and TV shows by category (e.g. Action/Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy, Horror, Musicals and many more), using the menu on the left, or by using the links in the center of the screen.
Once you navigate to a move or show of your choice, you’ll see something like this on the screen (this is the Bruce Lee movie, Enter The Dragon):
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To the right of this panel, and assuming that you are an Amazon Prime member in the United States, you’ll see a green button labeled Watch Now:
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When you click this button, there will be a slight pause while the system connects, and then the movie will start playing right in your web browser.
If you move your mouse over the lower part of the movie window, you will find a number of controls:
- a Play / Pause button
- a Volume slider
- information about your Connection
- a Pop Out button, which will open the movie in a separate browser window, which you can then re-size as you wish
- a Full Screen button, which will re-size the movie to fill your entire computer screen.
And that’s it – a huge range of movies and TV shows for you to watch whenever you want, for no additional cost.
What’s Amazon Prime Movies Worth?
Just to show you what this benefit alone is worth, let’s assume you rent a movie every day, for an entire year, which is not unreasonable given how much TV many people watch these days.
As you will see from the screenshot above, it costs $2.99 USD to rent a movie (for up to 48 hours), so if you rented just one movie a day for 365 days, your total bill would be a massive $1,091 USD! (And if you wanted to buy the movies instead of renting them, this cost would easily triple, or more.)
Doesn’t that make the annual $79 USD cost of Amazon Prime seem like a drop in the ocean (and that’s not even taking into account the free shipping and free Kindle books that are included in the membership)?
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