Doesn't Prime have 100 million US subscribers now? And Netflix is something like 60 million. I guess these analysts predict they'll both stagnate while Apple will grow from 0 to 100 million in 5 years?
Other Amazon Prime benefits requires that Amazon have a local presence in your country or area, so it makes sense that it's limited to countries where Amazon at least have distribution centers.
Speak for yourself. I live outside the US, and can't get any Amazon Prime or free delivery.
I subscribe to Amazon Prime Video for The Grand Tour and other Amazon exclusive video-content.
Yes, it's a small catalogue, but 4K Prime costs me 1/3 of what 1080p Netflix costs, so I'm OK with that.
This was the whole attraction of Netflix - it was a single service that got you most of what you wanted. Now there's Netflix, Stan, Amazon, Disney Channel, etc.
A few do what you're describing here. One of our friends switches back and forth between Netflix and Stan every three months. But more and more of my friends who were perfectly happy to pay for 1-2 streaming services are going back to good old torrents because none of the streaming services offer a good value proposition any more.
I pay for both Amazon Prime and Netflix yet I find the value proposition of torrents better.
It happens quite often that I later on discover that some TvShow I'm watching through torrents is available in Amazon Prime. This is what happens when torrent websites have less Ads than services one pays for.
For torrents, I just download whole TvShows (all seasons), watch them, and that's it.
It has happened a couple of times that Netflix or Prime remove a TvShow while I'm in the middle of watching it, or that they have all seasons except for the last one.
Also, the Netflix app on the Apple TV is now super crippled. Netflix removed support to play to an Apple TV from an iphone earlier this year, etc.
The offer of TvShows, Movies, etc. in Amazon Prime sucks. You have to buy most of the stuff on top of the subscription, and when you do buy it, you still get Ads. The offer of Movies in Netflix is better, but kind of sucks as well. There are a lot of "Made by Netflix" movies that just prove that throwing money at a problem not always solves it.
I will probably continue to pay for Prime because of deliveries, but Netflix doesn't make much sense anymore. Our money would be better spent paying for something like HBO, or going out for dinner once per year.
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All in all, torrents don't break my balls. They are simpler and less annoying to use, work overall better, have a larger offer, I can watch them with bad connectivity after the fact (e.g. planes, trains, buses, etc.).
I'll gladly pay for a service that is as good as what I get for free. Hell, I'm paying for multiple services that are worse in many ways. We already have two Apple TV devices at home, if Apples' subscription service becomes better than Netflix, we will switch. Last time I checked, Apple's service was way worse than Netflix.
It is sad to compare all this mess with Music. I use spotify and soundcloud, and am very happy with both. I have Prime Music, never used it. Since I have spotify it has never occured to me to use torrents for music either.
Yes, but everyone (including Netflix, analysts, and every observer with two brain cells to rub together) new that was temporary, and it started breaking down when Blockbuster started aggressively bidding for exclusives for their streaming service.
Netflix having everything was only going to happen as long as everyone else was standing back to see if Netflix could prove streaming a viable market worth competing for.
And yet the total number and $ value of streaming subscriptions sold in the market is going up as more options emerge, not down.
With more subscriptions, they will steal or claim content from existing ones, effectively driving their value down. Sure some will create content, as they have been doing for a while now but that doesn't change the fact that if I want to watch The Office, I used to have to use a VPN to watch it through Netflix US, now it's on Amazon Prime but where will it be in 2 years?
It wasn't. Netflix's selection was never, ever comprehensive, it just used to be focused a bit more tightly on 18 - 35 males than it is today.
And Netflix subscriptions never replaced other sources for the vast majority of their subscribers - the majority of Netflix subscribers in all major Western territories are also subscription satellite or cable subscribers.
Cable cutting was always a very, very minority pursuit, and HN is a massive bubble about it.
The best solution for the content industry as a whole would be to set up a clearing house, that provides access to all movies and series, streaming services should then be able to purchase the content they want on their service. That would allow the services to compete on the quality of their service, not their catalog. Let's face it consumers don't care if Star Wars is created by Disney or Warner Bros or that Breaking Bad is distributed by Sony.
Before the introduction of Apple Music it seemed like Spotify/Deezer/Tidal/Pandora/Google Music had the market divvied up pretty well, but because every time you tapped the 'Music' app your iPhone would nag you with 'would you like to try Apple Music?' a lot of people signed up, and Apple Music subscriber count shot up.
Spotify was the main and only thing around with MOG/Beats being a much smaller competitor alongside a few others like Napster/Rhapsody and Rdio before it went defunct.
This is unlike tv streaming which is more diversified and Apple can’t come in and give you everything like how it was with music.