On Hulu Plus, you can currently watch episodes of “Modern Family,” “The Daily Show,” “Downton Abbey,” “Glee,” and many more TV shows.
Some of the Netflix titles I’ve watched or browsed through recently include: “30 Rock,” “Arrested Development” and “The West Wing” and, on the movie side, “Tiny Furniture,” “Lost in Translation,” “Louis C.K.: Chewed Up,” and “Blue Valentine.” Netflix’s assortment of romantic comedies is probably enough to satisfy any Nora Ephron fan.
Often you’ll hear things from these services like, “We carry Epix movie titles,” or “The streaming content will be available 28 days after the DVD is available.” That’s great. Right now, Redbox Instant only streams around 8,000 movie titles and, again, it doesn’t offer TV episodes. Amazon Prime members can access around 33,000 movies and TV episodes through the subscription, with 140,000 episodes available through the entire Instant Video service.
Hulu Plus subscribers can stream more than 63,000 TV episodes and 3,700 movie titles. Netflix won’t specify exactly how many movies and TV episodes can be streamed, except to say that it has “hundreds of thousands” of titles available through both DVDs and instant streaming. New (And Old) Movies, Available Through Instant Streaming Popular TV Shows, Available Through Instant Streaming For example, I purchased “Eat Pray Love” for $12 through Redbox Instant. Additionally, some of the titles can be digitally purchased and stored in your Redbox account. That also includes four DVD rental credits to redeem at any of the 42,000 Redbox kiosks across the U.S. Redbox Instant offers unlimited streaming for $8 per month. Rentals are usually $4 or $5, and most movie purchases range from $8 (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” for instance) to $15 (“Snow White and the Huntsman”). If you’re not a member, and you want to rent or buy one digital download, you do that through the Amazon Instant Video Store. So, if you’re a Prime member, you have unlimited access to the Prime Instant Video catalog at no additional cost.
Amazon’s subscription-based streaming video service is tied to Amazon Prime, the company’s two-day shipping service, which costs $79 a year. Hulu Plus, the subscription-based version of Hulu, charges $8 a month for unlimited streaming.Īmazon and Redbox Instant offer both subscription video services and individual purchase options. You can also get DVD mail-in service (one rental at a time) for an additional $8 a month. Netflix charges $8 a month for unlimited movies and TV shows streamed through the Web. It currently doesn’t offer any TV content. And Redbox Instant is the newest entrant, with the smallest number of titles. Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service can be less compelling than it’s a la carte service, Amazon Instant Video its biggest benefit is that if you’re already an Amazon Prime shipping subscriber, you can stream the Prime video for free.
Hulu Plus is better for TV shows than movies, although Hulu Plus runs ads, and newer TV shows tend to be only from ABC, Fox and NBC. Below is a guide to how they stack up against one another in the U.S., but, in short: Netflix is still my go-to streaming service for newer TV shows, some new movies and a bunch of old movies (despite company stumbles and lapsed content deals that made me pause my subscription for a while last year).