Amazon Prime (not the leader of the Autobots nor an incredible simulation)

To find out a price history of an item on Amazon I've been pointed to this website: http://camelcamelcamel.com

I've ignored signing up and just put the URL of the item in the top search bar and it seems to work well.

It turns out that they actually offer same day shipping with Prime here in Glasgow. If you order before noon things arrive later that day and the range available seems quite extensive.

I haven't set it up yet, but it also seems I can share some of my Prime benefits with my girlfriend as part of a household. That's very neat too.

I can imagine I'm going to end up paying for the year in the end.

Did my first same-day delivery. It worked precisely as advertised and was very handy - ordered about 11:30am, arrived about 7pm. Hopefully it wasn't actually like this, but I did feel guilty imagining a delivery van driving the 50-ish miles from the warehouse to my flat that evening with my single item.

I signed up for Prime last month after years of putting it off because I never had the spare cash to drop on the cost all in one go. But now you can pay for it monthly (and it comes with Amazon video, which I've used a bit already).

Basically, the $10.99/mo pays for itself really quickly.

It also comes with the Amazon Music streaming service, and here's where I'd like some opinions. Is it good enough to forsake spending extra on Spotify and/or Apple Music?

nah

actually it doesn't have a streaming service like spotify yet, you can just stream your own music

I stand corrected, they have streaming now, but it sure hasn't done much for me

Selection is v poor vs Spotify - I sometimes use the playlists or radio function if I can't be bothered thinking.

It's a nice extra but not worth subscribing for. I don't even know if Prime Video is 100% worth the price but it's come a long way over the past few years, possible they'll improve Music as well.

Prime membership is such a weird hodgepodge of stuff. It's really hard to value the shipping plus entertainment media combo.

I like the Video offerings but I already have Netflix and order from Amazon maybe twice a year, so it's like juuuuust not quite worth it

Might get back on if they offer that huge discount again (and/or I get some more money coming in)

I'm on my annual free 30 days Prime trial again. God the stuff on there is pretty awful.

Have managed to finally watch Batman Dark Knight Rises thought, and Mad Max was pretty fun. Other than that? A whole lotta nothing.

That's nuts, there is so much good stuff.

Near random stuff in my watchlist:

City of God
Captain Fantastic
Moonlight
Salesman
Paterson
20th Century Women
Sweet Hereafter
Married to the Mob
Prom Night
History of Violence
The Handmaiden
Green Room
The Witch

And so on. I suppose some of these come and go from Prime, but I think most of these are current.

Plus whatever original programming is there now. They seem to be ramping up further.

Prime Video makes it hard to find the good stuff sometimes, even on my FireTV half the easy to find recommendations are cheap documentaries and straight to video garbage.

http://instantwatcher.com/a

There's a fourth season of Bosch coming, but no date yet.

I got invited by Amazon to complete a survey regarding changes to the Prime set up. I guess they'll be changing the price and what's included before too long. They had me laboriously choosing which I'd go for out of various combinations of the shipping/movies/music/photo storage/e-books/deals/etc features of prime at differing price points, trying to gauge which were most important and how much I'd pay for them. I'm very happy at £79 per year, but will baulk if they raise the price or drop any features I do actually use.

From the way they set the questions up it seems like they want to raise the price quite significantly for Prime that features both video streaming and one-day/same-day delivery and have cheaper options that drop either one or both of those aspects.

Doesn't sound surprising; with the explosion of streaming video they presumably have to recoup more costs now.

fuck amazon

they're bad but hey we got The Handmaiden out of it

I never really wanted Amazon Video to begin with so I can sign up for the delivery only

do we have a thread for Amazon's horrific labor practices

http://fortune.com/2017/11/24/amazon-black-friday-2017-strike-italy-germany/

Worst American tech company thread yeah

Also, they just opened in Australia and made the odd decision to charge higher prices than their competitors for pretty much everything

pulling a real "target in canada" move there

It's ok the "invisible hand" will self correct

They do that to us too but the maddening thing is never being sure if the item will ship here until you're halfway through buying it

Also no .ie site so kindle is through .com but all else through .co.uk

For a company essentially based four miles from my apartment. Dicks.

Sry deems if they actually sold things in Ireland they might have to pay taxes on it

Valid point of course

Like it's not that we're not grateful for the job