One month ago, I signed up to a free trial of Amazon Prime. On the face of it, it sounds pretty good. Let’s look at the benefits…
- Free 1-day delivery on a whole load of items
- Half a million items to borrow through the Kindle Owners Lending Library
- Unlimited instant streaming of more than 15,000 titles with Prime Instant Video
And all for the low, low, price of £79 a year. Which you can only pay yearly, not monthly.
Now, let’s have a look at those benefits in turn, see how I did from my month’s free trial…
Free 1-day delivery…
Well, the first thing that happened was Amazon’s website crashed on the “confirm your order” page and duplicated the order I’d placed, sending 2 of each present to the recipient. Amazon were very good about this and arranged free collection but still, not an auspicious start.
And then it turned out that was pretty much the only thing I needed from Amazon during the trial month that was covered by Prime. I only needed to place 1 other Amazon order during the trial and that was for an item sold by an Amazon Marketplace seller and didn’t fall under the auspices of Prime. Fortunately, they dispatched fast and it wasn’t an urgent need, anyway.
I find that, with a bit of planning, I can get most thing from Amazon with their free delivery anyway.
Do I need Prime for 1-day delivery? No. Not even at Christmas when I might be ordering a lot.
Kindle Owners’ Lending Library
What a crock of crap that turns out to be – it’s only for people who own an actual, physical, Kindle. Not those of us with the app on our phone.
Do I need Prime for this feature? Nope, can’t use it at all. They’re 0 for 2 so far.
Instant Video
You would have thought this would be an absolute Godsend with all that sport clogging up the TV, but no. Did not even get a chance to sign in and watch one minute of anything. Let’s see…
- Switch on PS3
- Log in
- Find Amazon Prime app
- Launch
- Wait for app to update itself to latest version
- Log in (having retrieved password from wherever I wrote it down this time)
- Browse and hunt for something you want to watch
- Wait for buffering.
- Watch
Versus…
- Insert DVD (which has the added benefit of switching on both PS3 and TV)
- Log in
- Watch Angel.
TV time shouldn’t be taken up with menus, waiting, spinning loading images. Ideally, since these are actual physical DVDs I’ve purchased, I’d love it if a good chunk of my TV time wasn’t taken up by copyright warnings I can’t skip – have they not realised that one reason people might choose to get a pirated version of a DVD is so they don’t have this crap between them and their film? But I digress.
Am I going to get any use out of this feature? Don’t think so. I reckon owning a movie on DVD is the fastest way for me never to see that film again, goodness only knows how little I’d watch when I’d got that much at my fingertips! I know I’m missing out on stuff – whole seasons of TV shows I’d love to catch but just don’t have the time. But it’s not worth £79 a year.
The Verdict
Am I continuing my Prime subscription?
No.
I’m not entirely sure who Prime is aimed at – Kindle owners who order a lot of stuff from Amazon Prime sellers and spend all their free time watching films and TV streamed over the internet, I guess. Is that me? No.