Amazon is uniting every other streaming service against Netflix

Remember the livingroom? I remember mine. On cold winter nights, the whole family would gather around the television, and we’d sip hot chocolate and laugh at Budweiser commercials together. Legends say the livingroom is still somewhere in the house collecting dust to this very day, but we don’t go to the livingroom anymore. Now our entertainment comes to us: on our tablets, our laptops, our smartphones. Today, Amazon is bringing its Prime subscribers a bit of TV nostalgia by effectively bringing channels to video streaming. Amazon has launched their “Streaming Partners” program, a system that unifies streaming video services and lets you switch smoothly between them through your Prime account. Like television channels, but streaming. The goal, it seems, is to get all of your video services together in one place, but upon release, it’s not quite there yet. Major players like HBO GO and Netflix aren’t available, which isn’t really surprising. Instead, Amazon is leaning on smaller services like IndieFlix and Qello. Starz, Showtime, and AMC also got into the action, which is a big plus.