The Glade 4.0

I just got an email from Amazon informing me that they are increasing the price of the annual Prime membership to $99.

They cited all of the new features (Cloud storage, Cloud Music, free movies) as the reason for increasing the cost. Personally, I'd give up all of those things to keep the price the same...

This is a $20 bump for me, and has me questioning whether I want to renew or not.

To be fair they do have a good point when they say that the price hasn't changed since 2005.

I'm not sure I'll be renewing either.

I have a solution then. Give up those things, give me $30, and I'll add you to my account for the Prime shipping.

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The Dude abides.

Hmm..

I might take you up on that.

What kind of limits do you have on the credit cards saved in your profile?

Can you clarify? Why would Amazon limit the cards you could save?

Screeling adding you to his Prime wouldn't merge your accounts or anything.

I was joking...

It's still only $8.25/month. Seems fine. Of course, my renewal isn't up until next January, so I can be a bit more philosophical about it, I guess.

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/eyes "student" rate of 39$/year
/eyes student ID

hmm.

I JUST signed up for the free trial today. Apparently, once I complete the trial, it will lock me in to the current $79 price for a year, and then go up after that. I think it's going to pay for itself, with the free shipping. And I'm looking forward to trying out the Video Streaming to supplement our Netflix subscription.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

I'm debating as well. Amazon has lost a lot of its lustre for me over the past several months, from starting to charge sales tax here in Tennessee to bungling my "release day guaranteed" pre-order for South Park: The Stick of Truth, and now this.

I'm not tied into the Amazon ecosystem (down, Khross), as they've yet to produce a truly good tablet, and their VOD offerings don't have the nifty disc-to-digital thing Vudu has. Best Buy will price-match them and I get rewards at BB, as well as free two-day shipping.

I love the convenience of Amazon, but their appeal is waning.

Taamar and I gave it a shot, but since we don't shop at Amazon it was all about whether or not their streaming was worth the price of admission. Sadly, we were pretty rudely surprised to find that even paying the Prime subscription fee doesn't unlock all their streaming titles and we decided that it's simply not a good bargain for us.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

My current membership expires in July.

I did a little rough analysis of my purchasing over the last few years (using order history), and based just on the shipping discounts, it was a marginal benefit at $79. The free-with-prime video stuff is just not that compelling, and I do not use their cloud services at all.

I could probably justify a $10 bump, but $20 is too much I think...

At this point, barring significant changes, I'm probably going to let my membership expire, and see how it goes.

Like I said, I'll link your account to my Prime for $30. You'll get your shipping perks without the crap you don't care about anyway. We both win!

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The Dude abides.

I will accept the terms of your non-binding agreement if you agree to allow me full use of whatever credit/debit/gift cards that are associated with your account profile.

That was me too, if you are going to advertise a feature as a video service it feels dishonest to me that you'd tier it into free content and pay per view content.

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I literally can't imagine thinking Prime would give you access to everything in Amazon's VOD library.

Amazon is a store, like iTunes. Prime is a subscription service, like Netflix. I'd no more assume my Netflix (or Hulu) subscription would allow me access to shows on another service than I would Amazon/Prime.

Admittedly, I pay more attention to video rights and stuff than the average consumer, maybe (because job), but I thought it was common knowledge. *shrug* It's obviously a problem with the branding message; I'm just saying it's apparently one I didn't think existed.

See, Netflix and Hulu are where the confusion comes in. They're subscription VOD services, where a subscription gives you access to everything in their library.

Amazon's subscription service does NOT give you access to everything in their library. But they list their VOD service as a subset of Prime. They don't do a very good job, especially to the yet-to-subscribe user evaluating the value of the Prime subscription, delineating what is part of their VOD subscription service and what is part of their e-store.

They even name them confusingly. Amazon Prime Instant Video vs. Amazon Instant Video. It's not hard to see "Amazon Instant Video" and go "Oh, that's the thing that comes with Prime!"

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Why would anyone ever think that if you signed up for Prime you'd get unlimited access to thousands of streaming movies/TV shows?


Oh...

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Their branding is confusing as crap, especially on the app portals (PS3 is the one that springs to mind). You can be searching for a Prime movie to watch, see a genre that you want to check out (let's say, comedy), click on it, and then all of a sudden it's a pay/prime portal mixed again. "Oh, I'd like to watch that movie. Why is it asking for 4.99 now? Dammit that's a pay movie."

They absolutely need to set up options in all their apps for "PRIME only, All films, Pay only, etc". I'm sure it's designed that way to encourage pay content, but you're only annoying users.

I notice your image is titled "Lies.jpg". Is their claim inaccurate?

I'm not saying anyone's dumb for being confused by the marketing. I'm just saying in this particular instance, I never imagined anyone was.

I like to amuse myself and found the title lies to be amusing.

Is it a lie? No. Is it extremely misleading to not disclose that a good chunk of their video content requires a ppv fee? Without a doubt. It wouldn't even be so bad if they threw up an asterisk * and had fine legal print at the bottom of the page but they do not.

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Nowhere does it say you have full unadulterated access to their entire collection. It says you have access to thousands of titles, which you do. The branding is stupid but their claims are legit.

They seem to go out of their way to obfuscate two.

They seem to be doing this intentionally, because as Hopster pointed out, there is really no way to partition the two in your searches, on any platform.

This isn't a technology problem, it's a lackawanna problem.

Yeah, it definitely seems like it's set up to have this response:

"Oh, look at all the movies you get with prime! Let's see what we want to watch. Ooh look, we haven't seen that in a while. Oh it's 4.99. Oh well, let's watch it anyway."

I'm gonna have to dispute this one as on my Blu-Ray player, there was in fact a filter for "non-prime" videos. So once I discovered that there was a pay-to-watch subset, I was able to eliminate those results from my searches. The problem I had with the service was simply that I didn't know this up front. As Kaffis pointed out, the Hulu and Netflix streaming services aren't set up that way so I expected Amazon to follow that precedent and their advertising does nothing to make it clear that they do not.

Most frustrating to me was coming up against the PPV requirement in the middle of a TV season.
Watching the first 3 or 4 episodes of a season and then finding out I'd have to pay extra to see the rest left me feeling a touch bitter.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister