Since D2 is getting ready to head off to college this fall, we will again have access to a student .edu address and the ability to sign her up for an Amazon Prime student account. Our family does not have Netflix or any other streaming service at this time, but D2 thought it might be nice to have one available at school for her computer or Smart TV since she won’t have a DVR to record a favorite show or two.
Looking for simple pros/cons. Is one better for movies? TV shows? More recent TV shows??? Obviously the free shipping on Amazon is a good perk.
I have had Netflix for a long time, and have been on the fence about Amazon Prime. I think both are pretty good services, and neither is fully satisfactory. Neither is really strong in recent TV shows that they didn’t produce themselves. Hulu Plus pretty much has the market for recent broadcast series sewed up, and all of the premium cable channels are getting ready to do their own subscription streaming, so no one has, say, Game of Thrones, Girls, or Orphan Black streaming.
Netflix has done a pretty awesome job with its original/exclusive series (including House of Cards, Orange Is The New Black, Top Of The Lake, Daredevil, and the much-maligned Marco Polo that I really enjoyed despite its flaws). Amazon scored big with Transparent.
In terms of movies available for streaming, I think they all pretty much have the same recent, mainstream ones. Only a fraction of recent popular movies are available for streaming, though. When you go outside the mainstream, Netflix is pretty good but not great: there’s lots to see, but only about a 33% chance that something particular you want to see will be available. I don’t know what Amazon has available.
I am generally happy with the quality of Netflix’s stream.
Netflix has more free good movies. Amazon has less free good movies but it has some super good ones if you want to pay (about $2-$4 per single movie, $20-$25 for 12-14 episode TV season).
Neither is necessary. I can’t fathom why people pay for either service. It’s like when people buy drinks at Chipotle instead of getting a water cup.
There are a plethora of free online services for movies and TV shows that have pretty much every movie and show and update within a few hours of an episode coming out. On Netflix, sometimes you have to wait anywhere from 6 months to a year. And these sites have all of those Netflix series like OITNB and Sense8 and Daredevil for $0.
Check out the movie box app for computers and smart devices. With Movie Box, I have already downloaded Mad Max and Pitch Perfect 2 for free so that I can watch them offline when I want.
Also, check out Couchtuner and project free tv. Do not waste your money.
We have both. Weve been with Netflix since the beginning when they were the alternative to Blockbuster, by mailing movies directly you. If only had I bought stock! I love the series Netflix produces, and it is so cheap at $8/month it is worth it. For that monthly fee, you can have two users, my kids use it as well.
Amazon Prime is worth is as well. Not necessarily for the movies/shows, but my college aged kids get a lot of books from Amazon, and the two day delivery is worth it, especially since you can get it at a student rate. We also watch movies on prime as well.
Netflix is $11.00/month to use on 4 devices. This is what we expect to pay when the kids go off to college so we don’t get the message that 2 others are already using the service.
@dadoftwingirls Movie Box streams torrents of movies to your device…and torrents are always sketchy. There is nothing legal about the app. Download at your own risk…
I have Amazon Prime but wouldn’t get it just for the streaming. Aside from some interesting documentaries, I’ve found very few movies that I have wanted to watch. You can look through the listings and see if it matches your taste but to me it’s a lot of junk. My kids have netflix and seem to get a lot of use out of it for TV series at least.
Don’t ever download copyrighted content without paying for it. If at some point later in your life you need to get a security clearance and pass a polygraph, this will come back to bite you big time.
And those torrent apps are pretty much gateways for malware and viruses to get into your computer. Good luck with that. Pay them now, or pay them later.
I’d say Netflix is far better. I can find tons of interesting stuff on it. Amazon Prime video is a sidelight for Amazon, a way to encourage customers to pay the money for the free shipping service (that then generates more revenue because you buy from the company where you have “free shipping” you’ve already paid for). Netflix has a much deeper catalog of tv shows, movies and documentaries. They used to have more movies but the cost of those catalogs has increased.
Hulu has one really good thing: Criterion movies. If you’re a film buff, that may be worth it.
If you don’t have netflix now, but you have cable, kid should be able to watch most cable & network shows online by logging in with a cable provider id (set one up at home). Also useful for wifi hotspots.
We have netflix now, but I don’t know about letting D use the account in college. She already spends too much time on youtube.
There, fixed it. Keep in mind that many colleges and universities have strict rules against torrent streaming of copyrighted material.
Netflix streaming has been enough for both D’s. We also have Amazon Prime for shipping; streaming and their original content is a nice freebie on the side and helps fill in a few things that weren’t on Netflix streaming (e.g. D1 watching The Wire). We also do Netflix DVDs–it’s a far cheaper alternative than cable.
Did Hulu Plus for a month to get access to the final season of the Israeli drama “Srugim”; hated the ad breaks. We have Adblocker installed, and Hulu Plus’s way of dealing with it is to give you just an empty screen during the commercial time.
Remember that buying legit downloads of a season or even buying DVDs is an option, and can sometimes be more cost effective.
I also think Netflix is better - far greater selection of interesting content, including foreign films and documentaries. But I agree with JHS that neither is ideal for new/current shows.
Over on the University of Alabama FB page, one parent reported that students were getting legal notices of copyright infringement (they were torrenting pirated media content) and were being billed in the tens of thousands of dollars.
I would be really careful about using Torrent services, it might seem like it is a free way to get software, but in the end it eventually will bite you in the butt.Those sites continually shift, but they are monitored by various copyright holder agencies, and when they see connections back to an ISP, they will trace it back, especially if they find a lot of people on an ISP doing that, and the response will range from cease and desist orders to prosecution. Yeah, on any individual download, your odds of getting caught are small, but do it any length of time and you will be found out.
More importantly, while I have my problem with the way movies are distributed and it is frustrating that services like Netflix and Amazon prime are pretty crappy with recent programs (it is one of the reason they are doing their own programming), there is an ethical problem there, too, because while people might feel that the services cost too much, or that new movies at 3, 4 bucks a clip is too expensive, they are in effect stealing. It is funny, I know someone who was a big advocate of torrent streams, of downloading movies and books and music from those sites, basically said it was no big deal because if they weren’t free, he wouldn’t watch them anyway, yet this person (who is a doctor), was constantly complaining of people trying to get free medical advice from him, but he couldn’t see he was doing the same thing. That said, the people who create the content have a right to set prices they wish to, and if we don’t want to pay it, we don’t.
My info is old but I thought that the .edu prime account did not include streaming video. Has that changed? I thought the only way to get the streaming video was to pay $99 for Amazon Prime But my kids have been out of college for a couple of years.
My S is the primary on our Amazon account. We can get the prime shipping but not the shows.