1. Given my listening habits, the library feels limited. Tried searches for the three albums I listened to the most this month (http://www.last.fm/user/labibrahman/charts):
Sylvan Esso - Sylvan Esso
Chet Faker - Built on Glass
Tycho - Awake
None are available for streaming. For a standalone service, this would be damning. As one of the perks offered with Prime this has the potential to become a compelling part of the package.
2. Amazon's store interface is not well suited for consuming media. I tried watching a few episodes of Friday Night Lights on the service instead of Netflix. Spoilers in episode descriptions meant that I had to very specifically control where I let my eyes over the UI. Next episodes don't auto play. Perhaps most annoyingly, there isn't a standalone URL I could go to for my streaming needs. To watch an episode I had to carry out the following steps:
Navigate to amazon.com
Search for Friday Night Lights
Skim the results to click on the TV show
Remember what season I was on
Skim the episode descriptions while avoiding spoilers
Click to stream, and make sure I don't accidentally click
on the 1-click buy button which is annoyingly right next
to the stream button.
My flow on Netflix:
Navigate to netflix.com
Click on the continue watching pane on top left corner of my screen.
I want Amazon to be a legitimate competitor in the space, but running everything through the store interface is killing any chance of me using Prime as a media consumption service.
3. I suspect that this works many orders of magnitude better on the Kindle Fire line of devices and that's great for people who already own Kindle Fires. If I don't already own one though, the Prime ecosystem should be driving to make that purchase and right now it is failing at that task.
The standalone URL for the Amazon movie catalog is amazon.com/vod (for video on demand I suppose). That's both prime and non-prime shows.
The UI is a bit weaker now on the website than it used to be. Before it would gray out the episodes you've watched. Now they gray out the background, but only if you've seen enough of the episode for it to "count". There's also a light green bar showing your progress through the episode on the right hand side.
If you use streaming with an app, like the one on the Playstation, you can click on "Your TV Shows", and it will remember which season and episode you watched last. So I click on the show, and it remembers I'm on episode 10. Barring that I try to remember to keep the most reason season on my watchlist (since unlike Netflix, you can add a season to a watchlist rather than a show)
I agree the autoplay is slightly annoying. At best I've figured out there's a "skip" button in the UI to tell it to play the next, but that's still manual.
Where did you get the 20 million figure from? It seems very low. I mean, there are millions of apps on the Apple AppStore. Surely, after decades of creation, there must be tens of millions of albums, and an order of magnitude more songs?
Until extremely recently, it's been near impossible to get people to listen to your album without it being in a store. These stores have traditionally had gatekeepers in the form of record labels. It doesn't seem that low if the question is "how many songs have been written under record labels which have access to the stores".
Note: The 18MM on Spotify aren't all available to you. They count all songs in their catalog, and many are limited to specific regions (e.g. Europe-only).
I suspect the same is true for iTunes (but I'm not sure)
I had the same result looking for my recent most-played bands. From what I've found so far, the only artists I like for whom they have good coverage are Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam. So I guess you're in luck if you love the '90s.
Even the "popular artists" list that they're pimping on the front page is more striking for what's missing than what's there. They don't have the vast, vast majority of REM's discography (including "Automatic for the People"!), most of Pink's albums, anything by Cher besides "Believe", literally any of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' albums that you would have heard of (seriously, why are they even listed?), Shakira's "Laundry Service", "Oops!…I Did It Again" by Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake's second album — and that was just glancing around as I wrote this paragraph. The most confounding part is that there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to what they have or don't have.
Just remember that the price of prime is going up $40 a year and part of that new $40/year you are paying is for this. As with many of the perks that Prime gets you it feels like it isn't very good, but it feels "free" so it is hard to complain much.
My fear would be that there are a lot of people that will be okay with Amazon Prime services that are not very good just because they got them for "free" thus stopping new companies from attempting to get in on the same market.
I've already resolved to cancel my Prime subscription, and this reveal just confirms my decision. I was happy with getting free 2-day shipping for $40 (or even $80) a year. I'm not happy paying $100 for a less robust "2-day shipping" service, a crappy VOD service, and a music streaming service with none of the music I listen to.
I'm with you. Prime was great for "free" delivery for the physical items I purchased from Amazon.
However, Prime Video is not something I can use. In short, does it work on Linux? No. Therefore, the price increase for no apparent benefit has now priced me out of this product.
Pardon me, but could you expand on "a less robust '2-day shipping' service"? I'm not aware of what you're talking about and would like to know, as I'm currently a Prime customer as well.
Blast Tyrant by Clutch. 3 songs from the original album plus one more from the extended album. This isn't an album where there's only two or three good songs, they're all solid gold if you like the genre. And I certainly wouldn't pick The Regulator as one of the top three songs; Ghost feels very similar but IMO has more going for it. So how did The Regulator get picked?
--I must have pissed someone off because I feel I'm being followed around and all of my posts downvoted for no reason at all. Please explain.
There are actually some very strict legal requirements preventing streaming-video services from providing "linear content" (i.e. anything that works like a TV channel.) Anyone that seems to do so (e.g. Netflix) still stops every few episodes to get you to press a button to continue.
Happily, this is entirely irrelevant to within-home streaming. Plex can auto-play for as long as you like.
I've worked in the online video streaming industry and I've never heard of such a restriction. I have heard of such restrictions for music streaming, however. (i.e. to be a "radio" service, a.la Pandora, you cannot have a predictable linear playlist).
Even if you have "auto-play", this is vastly different than the "scheduled content" of traditional TV.
Netflix stops every few episodes because there are per-stream costs, whether bandwidth or licensing (it's a waste to leave shows playing all night while someone's left their computer).
I'd always assumed Netflix required that user behavior on their end to avoid serving content that wasn't actively being consumed so I'm surprised to find that it's a licensor requirement.
They will require you to click on a "continue" button every once in a while if you have no interaction with the HTPC and it's doing auto-play. Perhaps once every hour or two - only slightly annoying.
2. Amazon's store interface is not well suited for consuming media. I tried watching a few episodes of Friday Night Lights on the service instead of Netflix. Spoilers in episode descriptions meant that I had to very specifically control where I let my eyes over the UI. Next episodes don't auto play. Perhaps most annoyingly, there isn't a standalone URL I could go to for my streaming needs. To watch an episode I had to carry out the following steps:
My flow on Netflix: I want Amazon to be a legitimate competitor in the space, but running everything through the store interface is killing any chance of me using Prime as a media consumption service.3. I suspect that this works many orders of magnitude better on the Kindle Fire line of devices and that's great for people who already own Kindle Fires. If I don't already own one though, the Prime ecosystem should be driving to make that purchase and right now it is failing at that task.