Amazon Prime Video is now a standalone monthly service

Starting tomorrow, you won’t need to pay $100 in one shot to sign up for a year of Amazon Prime, according to the New York Times. The retail giant will not only launch a monthly option for its full Prime service at $10.99 per month, but will also break out its Prime Video service for $8.99 a month. The streaming option appears to be a concerted effort by the retail giant to take on Netflix, which recently increased the price of its services to new users from $8.99 to $9.99.

Sprint recently started offering monthly Amazon Prime subscriptions (but not Prime Video) for the same price. That may have served as a live test for Amazon, which liked the results enough to launch the service itself. However, Amazon tried offering Prime as a monthly $7.99 a month service back in 2012 and quietly dropped the idea.

The $99 annual option is still available and is a much better deal, assuming you can afford to pay in one chunk. Going with the full Prime option by the month would cost you an extra $32, while the $8.99 per month Prime Video subscription would be $107.88, still more than an annual subscription to Prime. However, thanks to Netflix, people have gotten used to a monthly subscription model, so this time, Amazon’s foray into periodic pricing might work.

Source: The New York Times