What is Amazon Prime?
It is a premium, paid version of Amazon that gives you access to faster delivery, free books, music, and access to the Amazon Prime video service, which houses original content by Amazon on content licensed from other platforms.
Amazon Prime Video Nigeria- signing up
Recently, Amazon launched their Prime Video Service as a standalone product in Nigeria. It costs 2,300 Naira a month and has a seven day free trial. Unlike other apps that seem to have a problem with most local cards, it seemed to work fine with my regular card, that didn’t work for the “Nigerian version” of Tidal, Spotify or Youtube.
The app is on iOS and Android platforms, and can be downloaded for free. It can also be accessed via any web browser. Once downloaded, there are prompts to guide you through the setup and payments.I already had an amazon UK account with prime that didn’t work for this Nigerian service. It may have worked if I switched my local country on amazon itself but I didn’t think it makes sense to do that for the purpose of one service…so I set up a brand new amazon account for the sole purpose of getting the Nigerian prime video.
Catalogue/User Experience
Prime Video in Nigeria includes all the same content as prime anywhere else. There are a lot of Nollywood films/tv shows to the extent that it is almost as good as watching something like iroko tv (I assume).I checked this assumption and there are only 142 movies/tv shows in the Hollywood category, which is decent, but definitely not on the same level as a dedicated service for Nigerian content. With Nollywood being the third largest film industry in the world. It makes sense that streaming services are finally putting up Nigerian content AND giving us access to it. The app is intuitive and easy to use and plays nice with my buggy internet service provider.
A cool feature on the app is the x-ray function which tells you who is in a scene when you pause, which is so useful if you’re usually like “the girl that likes corn” to describe a character instead of the character name. I was watching Making the Cut (definitely nowhere as good as protect runway) and you could shop directly on the site by scanning the barcode that came on screen.
Is it worth it?
It depends on what you watch. As I mentioned earlier, there’s also a 7 day free trial. As long as you cancel in that 7 day period, you won’t get charged. So it’s worth getting it and seeing if it’s worth it for you or if you’re already at your streaming limit by now.