CBC TV & Amazon come to the Apple TV

Two big players made announcements this week which should make cord cutters happy. Apple first announced at WWDC in June that Amazon Prime would be coming before the end of the year to the Apple TV. Many were left wondering what the delay was since June with Apple launching a 4K version of the Apple TV and a new OS for the device. Well the delay is over as Amazon Prime is now available on the Apple TV (in both US and Canada) This is a big deal as this is the last of the major streaming services that didn’t have an app for the Apple TV.

As a Amazon Prime (US) subscriber myself it means I can focus on using my Apple TV. Up until now I had to switch over to my Roku to use Amazon Prime on my TV. It’s nice to have one device that you can stream everything from. The Amazon Prime video service in Canada is still sparse with content although many of Amazon’s original series are there (The Tick, Bosch, The Man in the High Castle, Transparent, Mozart in the Jungle, Alpha House, One Mississippi, The Grand Tour and more) The Canadian version of Prime is $79.99 for the year and gets you free shipping. I personally don’t buy a lot off of Amazon.ca and unless you do I don’t think the video product alone is worth that amount for an entire year.

Although each person is different I think there is about 3-4 months worth of content on there at this point that you may want to watch. In the US Amazon Prime is $99 (US) for the year but you can also subscribe to the video only service for $8.99 (US) per month. The library in the US is a bit more robust.

We have a US membership at our house because we own a few Amazon Alexa devices and our Prime membership comes with Amazon music streaming and I tend to rent and buy movies and TV series through Prime video. I prepaid for season 3 of Rick & Morty through my Prime account which allowed me to watch the episodes the next day after they aired (Pickle Rick!)

The other big announcement of the week was CBC revamping its current CBC TV app to offer a $4.99 subscription version of the service. We have had a lot of questions about this mostly around why CBC is offering a subscription service. The app itself is free to download. CBC has been on a bit of a tear this year as it now has 5 apps that are free to download and use.

CBC News, CBC Radio, CBC Music, ICI TouTV and the latest the CBC TV app. When it first launched a few months ago you could watch all your favourite past and present CBC TV shows on demand the catch was that there would be some commercials to contend with while watching.