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  • Amazon is Now Offering A La Carte Channels
Technology Articles > Entertainment > Televisions > Amazon is Now Offering A La Carte Channels

There’s some new from Amazon this morning that you’ll want to know about if you are a Prime user. The company is now allowing Prime users to add various channels to streaming packages including Showtime.

Upwards of twenty new channel possibilities are available to those people that subscribe to the service. If you live in the US (not available in Canada yet) and you have Prime, here’s what you need to know.

Additional Payments

Even though you have to be a Prime member in order to get the new channels, this isn’t quite enough. In order to get the new channel options, you will have to subscribe to the channels, which means an additional payment. The channels will run you an additional $8.99 per month, which is a lot cheaper than purchasing a complete cable package or even purchasing the channels through a streaming service like iTunes.

This is the first time that some of these channels have been offered outside of a traditional cable package plan, so Amazon is making a huge leap here. However, Amazon isn’t the only company offering these channels to subscribers. You can get Showtime through Hulu as well, and that pricing is comparable. If you don’t have Prime, you can’t access the new channels that Amazon is offering, so keep that in mind (Prime is around $100 per year).

Free Trials All Around

If you do have a Prime account, you can get a free trial of the new ‘Streaming Partners Program’ through Amazon right now. Once that trial is up, you will have to purchase a package to continue the streaming options. As far as where you can see your new channels, you will have to stick with iOS, Android, Fire TV, Kindle Fire, and Roku for now. So, take that into account when you purchase the new package as well.

You can also change package options on a monthly basis, so if you do get sick of the channels that you have available, you can just switch it up. Amazon has also told press that the company plans to add additional channels in the future, but right now the options that exist are what you will have to choose from currently.

A Move Away from Traditional TV

As more and more companies like Hulu and Amazon start to offer channels that have never been available outside of traditional cable packages before, you will start to see a break away from traditional cable channels. The downside to this is that these kinds of options are only available in the United States at the moment, so you can’t access any of this non-cable goodness if you live in any other country.

Finally TV watchers are starting to have more option than the expensive cable package. If you want to select which channels you want to pay for (and skip those channels that you never watch) this is going to be a lot simpler to do in the future with companies like Amazon leading the way.