Freedom Fighters

Free yourself from the tyranny of TV schedulers! Amazon Instant Video and Netflix have changed our TV viewing habits for ever. They may take over your lives, but they’ll never take your freedom to binge on a boxset

Watching films from the comfort of your own sofa no longer requires shopping for Blu-rays and setting aside a huge amount of shelf space to accommodate your growing collection. There has been a similar change in watching TV too – the days when your evening’s viewing revolved around Radio Times listings and programme recording are long gone. The arrival of video streaming services has seen to that, spearheading a ‘next generation’ of TV that looks set to stay.

For the past few years, having thousands of hours of content available to stream 24/7 to our telly at home or on the smartphone in our pocket has changed our viewing habits, making marathon film trilogies and bingewatching TV boxsets the new going out.

It doesn’t have to come at a price either, with YouTube and UK catch-up services like BBC iPlayer and ITV Player serving up hour after hour of free streaming. What a world we live in, eh?

But none has the content diversity or versatility of the two giants of video streaming, Amazon Instant Video and Net ix. Theirs is an intense battle that mirrors the rivalry between Spotify and Apple Music in music streaming.

Both offer thousands of movies and TV shows, old and new, for as little as £6 per month. There aren’t enough hours in the day to warrant two subscriptions, so which service should you hand over Friday nights in and lazy Sundays to?

Subscriptions

For the first month, why not try both? Amazon and Netflix each offer 30-day free trials, so it goes without saying that you should reap the benefits of having twice as much content as you could ever sit through. Just because you can.