Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, which means you probably wouldn’t be reading this anyway, you have probably heard someone say something about Prime. If they were talking about a giant robot that turns into a semi-truck, then you need to read on, but if they were talking about the one that offers free shipping from Amazon, then you definitely need to read on because 2016 is going to be the year that everyone should consider plunking down that $99 payment for Amazon’s Prime Membership.
What originally started out as free 2 day shipping on most Amazon purchases has blossomed into an array of services that rivals almost everything else we pay monthly for. If you are a Netflix user, you can use Amazon Prime Video instead. If you are a Spotify or Pandora subscriber, Amazon Prime Music is the way to go. You also get unlimited photo backups of you photos taken with your mobile device with the Amazon Prime Photos service. Of course, one of the earliest features of Prime, and the most overlooked, is the Kindle Lending Library. If you own a Kindle, you can ‘borrow’ one of 800,000 free books each month at no charge. Overall, it could save some users about $30 a month in subscription fees and
Amazon Prime Video has vastly improved since launch. What originally began as 15,000 streaming titles has blown up to more shows and movies than a normal human can consume in a lifetime. Where they lagged behind Netflix and Hulu 5 years ago, Amazon has stepped up the game and brought many exclusive titles and created their own content. The deal they inked with Showtime also gave them quite a boost in exclusive content as well. The other amazing feature about Amazon Prime Video, and a major leap ahead of the competition is the fact that you can download titles to your mobile device for offline playback. This is a total data saver while taking that roadtrip or sitting in a doctors office with three screaming children wanting to watch that new favorite movie. Amazon Prime Video is well worth the $99 a year just as a cable replacement option alone. Adding in the other features is just a nice bonus.
Amazon Prime Music has also grown up quite a bit in the past few years since it was released. Currently, the service offers streaming and downloading of over a million titles and has pre-created playlists to match just about any mood you may have going on a daily basis. The fact that you can create you own playlists in Amazon Prime Music is also a nice feature. Again, just like the video service, you can download your Amazon Prime Music selections for offline playback which saves a huge amount of data over services like Pandora, Spotify and iHeartRadio.
Amazon Prime Photos is another money saver as well. We’ve all been given those ‘sample’ plans of 100GB of this service or that service to save our photos to from our mobile devices. What they don’t tell you is how much it will cost you to keep that AFTER your year or two expires. Yes, those 150GB of vacation photos and videos are going to go bye bye if you don’t download them or worse yet, pony up $30 a year to keep your free storage space allotment. Companies like Google and Microsoft did the freebie thing, now their rates for online storage are starting to increase. But with Amazon Prime Photos, the space is yours as long as you keep your membership active.
Finally, the last major feature of Amazon Prime is the Kindle Lending Library. This one is pretty simple in the fact that if you own a Kindle, you can get a free title every month from the Lending Library to read and return when you are done. Currently Amazon is closing in on the 1 million title mark, but there are more than enough books to keep the average reader going all year long. When you combine this with the Amazon Kindle First program and something like BookBub, there’s no reason why you can’t read all year long for free with your Amazon Prime membership.
Overall, there are far more reasons to grab an Amazon Prime besides the free shipping deal. Amazon Prime Music has something for everyone to listen to and can easily replace that $5-10 a month some users spend on music services. Amazon Prime Video has enough content now to scare Netflix and their ever increasing rates as well as keep almost live TV suppliers like Hulu at bay. The Amazon Prime Photo service will definitely keep users photos safe and sound without the threat of being removed if you don’t pay a fortune to some other company and the Kindle Lending Library should keep readers very busy all year long. Overall, Amazon Prime isn’t just a good deal on shipping, but it is a great way to save $100’s every year on services and even in data charges on your cell bill. Check out the link below for more information.
Link: Amazon Prime
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