I have written in past columns that Eddie and I stream media content, such as Netflix and Hulu, to our television sets with both an Apple TV and Smart TV. The Apple TV is a small wifi device that plugs into an HDMI port on a television set, enabling it to play streamed content. Similar devices are the Roku 4, Google Chromecast, and Amazon Fire. A Smart TV does pretty much the same thing, but without the need for a third party device. By definition a smart TV is a television set with integrated internet and wifi features.
Each device, or television manufacturer, offers a variety of content, some of it specific to the device and some available across all platforms – each with a unique user interface. For that reason, even though we have two smart television sets in our house, we choose to watch Netflix and Hulu on the Apple TV because we prefer its interface. What we cannot watch on our Apple TV is Amazon Prime Video. Apple and Amazon are feuding and the result is that Apple TV is not available for sale on Amazon (although they do sell other Apple products) and Apple TV does not stream Prime Video.
We came upon Prime Video much by accident. Over the summer we signed up for Amazon Prime to take advantage of free, 2-day shipping on Amazon orders. We do not have a smart TV in New York, but when we arrived at TR in November we gave Prime Video a try. We liked the service — especially the streaming drama series Bosch. (If any of you are fans of the Michael Connelly novels about the detective Harry Bosch, you will love the Amazon Prime series. Season 1 is online now, and season 2 will be available in early March, but I digress.)
More recently we discovered another valuable component to an Amazon Prime subscription — Prime Music. On-demand, ad-free music streaming with access to over one million songs, is available to Amazon Prime subscribers at no extra cost. The two most popular steaming music services, Apple Music and Spotify, charge $9.99 a month, or $120 a year, while the price of an Amazon Prime subscription is $99. For that you get free 2-day shipping on Amazon purchases, Prime Video, Prime Music, and Prime Photo storage.
The music service can be accessed online, or with an Apple iOS or Android app. Once signed in to the service, you can choose to listen to preselected music from a wide variety of genres and artists, or you can create your own playlists and listen to just the music you want to hear. What makes it even more exciting is that it interfaces with our Sonos sound system which wirelessly streams music to every room in our house.
I also mentioned that Amazon Prime membership includes Prime Photos, which offers unlimited cloud storage of digital photos. We discovered the photos service during our recent Hawaii trip when we needed a quick and easy way to archive the photos on one of our iPhones. The upload was effortless, and the photos, which can be as large as 2GB, are easily accessible from any device. Personally, I found using Prime Photo much less cumbersome than Apple’s iCloud.
In our current economic climate, we never know from one month to the next what will happen in our economies. I can only say that at this point in time Amazon Prime, for all it offers, is a bargain at $99 a year.
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