Audio Video News

Amazon is dropping the requirement that you have to sign up for a year to access its Prime membership services and taking aim at Netflix by adding a subscription option that will offer Prime Video as a standalone service at $8.99 a month, according to a CNN Money report.

From the report:

On Sunday night the online retailer is turning on a monthly subscription option for its bundle of Prime services, like free shipping, a music library, and a growing collection of original TV shows and movies. Until now, Prime has only been available as a $99 annual subscription.

What's more, Amazon is now offering a separate monthly subscription just for its TV and movie collection—the part it calls Prime Video. Amazon has never made Prime Video available as its own product before. It's always been a part of the bundle. So it seems like Amazon is positioning Prime Video as a head-on competitor to Netflix and Hulu.

The standalone Prime Video service will cost $8.99 a month.

The new offering comes at the same time Netflix implements price hikes for many of its members. (Longtime subscribers to Netflix's standard plan who were paying $7.99 a month will start paying $9.99 a month in May.)

As for Amazon, the company says it has decided that Prime does not have to be one-size-fits-all. The $99 annual bundle will remain in place, and will remain the best value overall.

The month-to-month subscription for just Prime Video would cost $107.88 over the course of a year. But Amazon expects the offer to appeal to some new subscribers because it avoids an annual commitment.

Amazon will also sell the full Prime bundle, including free shipping, for $10.99 a month, coming out to $131.88 over the course of a year.

The company started to test this monthly option through a partnership with Sprint last month. Sprint customers are able to add the Prime bundle to their wireless bill each month.

The rationale for that, similarly, was that it created a new on-ramp onto Prime and provided an alternative to an annual commitment.

Leave a comment and tell us about your preferred streaming service and what you think of this offer.