The battle between Netflix and Amazon is like the battle between two cats. They have similar power, they are eager to win and they get a nice hit on the other one from time to time.
Only two weeks has passed since I reported that Netflix just introduced offline viewing for lots of the TV series and movies available in the Netflix application. This was Netflix hitting back at Amazon, a company that introduced a similar service more than 1 year ago.
In January Netflix placed a nice punch in the face of Amazon as they launched their services in lots of new nations, making it available in a total of around 200 countries worldwide. At that time Amazon Video was only available in a handful of nations, so a big punch in the face of Amazon.
Now December is here and it was time for Amazon to punch back. And it wasn’t just a little punch, this was a hard and tough one. They just launched Prime Video in more than 200 countries, and to make it even harder, for a lot less than Netflix. They offer new customers Prime Video for as little as 3 USD per month (for the first six months), and after that they have to pay the regular fee which will be 6 USD per month. That ain’t much considering the fact that a standard fee for the cheapest Netflix subscription is around 9 USD (at least) in most countries around the world.
One improvement with Prime Video is that it seems to be something you can bring with you across the world. So far Amazon Prime has been limited to certain nations, but with this upgrade you can now sign up for Prime Video anywhere and you can watch all original Amazon content wherever you might be in the world. There might be slight changes related to non Amazon content (like Mr. Robot and other TV series and movies), but at least all Amazon Originals can now be seen by anybody all across the world (with a few exceptions).
I find this to be quite cool and I believe it is good for Netflix to get some serious competition. Maybe they will be forced to improve the quality of their services even more?
