The Best Free Videos on Amazon Prime

TV shows on Amazon Kindle Fire

I love Amazon’s supply of free videos that you can watch if you’ve signed up for their Prime shipping service. You can watch them through the web, or on a Kindle Fire tablet, or even on an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3. Even if you’re not a Prime subscriber, you can still watch them if you’re willing to pay a small fee — usually $1.99 per video. (And Amazon gives you a free one-month trial when you register your Kindle Fire tablet.) But I was fighting a cold on Monday, so I spent a whole day exploring which videos are available for free in the Prime section of Amazon’s “Instant Video” library — and there’s a lot of interesting things to choose from!

To browse the selection, just point your web browser to
tinyurl.com/PrimeInstantVideo

Last week Amazon even announced a licensing agreement with NBC, so now there’s an even bigger selection. (“We’re excited to be working with NBCUniversal to add their award-winning lineup of TV shows such as Parks and Recreation and Friday Night Lights to Prime Instant Video,” Amazon announced in a statement.) But Amazon’s Prime video library already had a pretty good selection of new and classic TV shows to choose from. Yesterday Amazon announced that their most watched TV show is Downton Abbey — but you’ll see many more familiar names on Amazon’s list of their most-popular TV shows.


Glee
My Name is Earl
24
The West Wing
Grey’s Anatomy

Science Fiction
Fringe
Doctor Who (Season 1)
Battlestar Galactica
Firefly
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Star Trek (the original series, Enterprise, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager)
Red Dwarf
Stargate SG-1
The X-Files
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Lost
Alcatraz
The Twilight Zone

Comedy
Arrested Development
King of the Hill
Hot in Cleveland
Chappelle’s Show

’90s Favorites
Dawson’s Creek
Party of Five
21 Jump Street
Beverly Hills 90210
Ally McBeal
NYPD Blue

PBS / BBC
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Fawlty Towers
The Civil War by Ken Burns
Upstairs, Downstairs
The Office (the original British version)
The French Chef with Julia Child
The Tudors

There’s also a surprisingly good selection of shows for children, including Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants, but also Jim Henson’s forgotten HBO show from the 1980s, Fraggle Rock. And I discovered that you can even delve back into the vault for classic children’s shows, including every single season of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, and the original Electric Company with Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby, and Rita Moreno.

I was amazed that I my Kindle Fire pulled up TV shows that I hadn’t seen in more than 40 years, since I was a kid — including Archie cartoons from the 1960s! I used to come home from grade school to watch Gilligan’s Island or the original Star Trek — and now here were the same shows, being transmitted to my tiny handheld tablet! There’s even a selection of I Love Lucy episodes, plus “guilty pleasures” like Alf.

Of course, there’s also a pretty good selection of movies in Amazon’s Instant Video library, including some that are free to Prime subscribers.

    The Matrix Revolutions
    Ocean’s 11
    South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
and Team America
    Mission: Impossible (I and III)
    Beverly Hills Cop
    The Addams Family
    Food, Inc
    
Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief
    The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
(the original Swedish version)
    What Just Happened
    The Return of the Pink Panther
    Bullitt
starring Steve McQueen
    Basic Instinct 2

Just like in the TV section, I also saw some movie titles here that I haven’t seen in decades – so it’s a lot of fun seeing just what Amazon has available. I recommend browsing the video section – especially if you have some time to kill!

To browse Amazon’s selection of free Prime videos, just
point your web browser to tinyurl.com/PrimeInstantVideo

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