If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon — and these days, who hasn’t? — then you’ve likely heard about the option for an Amazon Prime membership. This subscription is mostly touted as a way to save on shipping costs when purchasing from Amazon, but it also comes bundled with some other handy features including access to Amazon’s streaming service, Amazon Prime Video. You’ll find a range of movies and shows to watch, but if you’re not sure whether you need yet another streaming service, there is an option for a free trial to see if you like the service before paying for it.
There is indeed an Amazon Prime Video free trial, but it’s tied into the Prime free trial, which lasts for a month and may or may not be available to you. To see if you’re eligible, you’ll need to head over to the Amazon Prime page and check. The general rule is that the Prime free trial (and by extension, an Amazon Prime Video free trial) is available to Amazon accounts that have either never signed up for a Prime trial or have not had Prime — either a trial or paid membership — any time in the last 12 months.
The Prime free trial is usually for 30 days, similar to the Hulu free trial. If you’re not eligible for the Amazon Prime Video free trial, though, then be patient: Sometimes, Amazon will sometimes offer free trials to its loyal customers, so if you have an Amazon account (but not a Prime membership) and shop on the site regularly, you might find a Prime trial offer sitting in your inbox one day. Often, though, these are shorter seven- or 14-day trials rather than the 30-day trial. Nonetheless, it’s obvious that Amazon is a bit more generous with these trial periods than other services — there’s no Disney+ free trial or Netflix free trial, for example, but it’s thankfully much easier to get an Amazon Prime Video free trial.
Amazon Prime is pretty popular, with more than 200 million subscribers, and Prime Video is no slouch, either. If there’s just one or two titles that you want to watch from the Prime Video catalogue, you can purchase or rent these without either an Amazon Prime or a Prime Video account. But if you want to watch multiple shows or movies, especially if you want the other advantages of Prime, it can make sense to sign up for an account.
Sometimes, you can get Amazon Prime or Prime Video for free through third-party offers. These could come with select purchases from certain retailers or come bundled with internet or cellular network service (usually with upgraded plans, such as unlimited). If you’re looking to sign up for a new ISP or switch network carriers, do some research to see if any of them are offering free Prime or Prime Video subscriptions, even if you’re only getting a few months before you have to pay or cancel your Prime membership.
One such free Prime offer comes from T-Mobile, which is bundling Amazon Prime with its prepaid Metro Unlimited plan. Pricing for T-Mobile Metro starts at $60 per line per month (and it’s cheaper per line if you add more lines on your plan), and since it’s prepaid, there are no annual contracts. That’s a nice way to get Amazon Prime for free, including Prime Video, if you’re shopping around for a new unlimited plan.
Alternatively, you might consider some of the other services with offers, like the Showtime free trial, HBO Max free trial, the Sling TV free trial, or even the Hulu with Live TV free trial. They’re certainly not the same as Prime Video, but they offer plenty of content to watch, especially on top of a subscription you already have!
Amazon offers discounts to new Prime members fairly regularly, you just have to keep your eyes open. You can always upgrade to the yearly membership, which is another way to score an Amazon Prime deal.
The Prime monthly membership comes to $180 per year ($15 per month for 12 months), but an annual Prime membership costs just $139. That averages to about $11.60 per month and saves you $41 — not a fortune, admittedly, but it’s money in your pocket.
Another way to save — provided you’re a college student with a valid .edu email address — is to sign up for a Prime Student membership. Not only is this cheaper than a standard subscription at $7.50 per month or $69 per year, but you also get a whopping six-month free trial. That’s possibly the most generous trial offer of any subscription service that we’ve seen, but true to its name, Prime Student is only available to those enrolled in at least one course at a U.S. university. There’s also an option to save using a program called Prime Access if you receive SNAP, Medicaid, or other qualifying government assistance, which costs $7 per month with a 30 day free trial.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?