Digital Home Thoughts: Engadget's Amazon Prime Instant Video Hands-On Test

"Amazon has just turned on its Prime Instant Video service, letting paid Prime subscribers (sorry, students) in the US (sorry, foreigners) stream any of 5,000 movies and TV shows directly to their machines free of charge -- well, free beyond the $79 Primers already pay. Jeff Bezos has confirmed that there will be no extra charge going forward for this service and that Prime itself will not be getting more expensive to pay for all these bits and bytes. Right now the selection is limited, particularly if you already have a Netflix subscription, but we just had to try it out. Click on through for our impressions on a variety of devices."

I'm used to applauding most moves that Amazon makes, but this one is a bit of a head scratcher. If Amazon were to survey 100 users of Amazon Prime and ask them "What would make this service even better?", I'd guess exactly zero of them would have said "Please add streaming video!". Sure, it's free if you're an Amazon Prime customer - which I'd totally be if they offered it in Canada - but can Amazon really compete with Netflix?