Photo Credit: PicJumbo
I was an early adopter of Amazon’s Prime Video service. They’ve offered tons of free content and a massive library of purchasable content for years now, and some time back the Amazon Streaming Video App for iPhone/iPad was released to allow folks to take the show on the road – literally. I’ve been a user of that app for about two years now, and the latest update brought a LOT to the table to make it even better.
First things first, if connected to WiFi, you can stream anything in Amazon’s catalog. Search for a show, tap the movie or episode in question, and away you go. Granted, this takes a lot of bandwidth, and you can be sure it’ll be blocked on public and in-flight WiFi services. Many are even getting smart enough to block it through VPN’s, so good luck with that.
However, one of the most interesting functions of the app is to let you download anything you’ve purchased for offline viewing. Get on a good connection, download whatever your device and hold, and you can watch it any time, even without a live connection to the Amazon servers. There was one issue with this feature, however, until recently you could not download anything but paid episodes and movies, no Prime shows or movies at all – that was streaming only.
The latest version of the app changed that to now allow any video in the service to be downloaded for offline viewing, with only a periodic re-connect to the service to verify your continued Prime subscription. Details on how often this happens is scarce, but I have gone several days without being online and had no problems at all. This opens up thousands more TV shows and movies that you can now take with you for anytime viewing.
All in all, if you’re looking for an alternative to iTunes video for long-haul, disconnected travel, Amazon has you covered. Happy viewing!