Amazon is adding a new feature to the pack to sweeten the deal for Prime subscribers – it offers them unlimited photo storage, a feature previously only available for Fire owners. Amazon Prime is a complete service package available for its subscribers that includes free two-day shipping on millions of items sold by Amazon, unlimited TV and movie streaming, unlimited music streaming, early access to Amazon specials, hundreds of thousands of free e-books, and – from now on – unlimited cloud storage for the users’ photos.
Through Amazon Prime the digital retailer has entered in competition with services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Box or Microsoft OneDrive to offer its users store their photos, videos, documents and music on its servers. Users can upload their files through apps available for the most popular mobile operating systems, Android and iPhone OS. Those not subscribing to Amazon Prime also got something new – all subscribers to Amazon Cloud Drive get 5 gigabytes of free storage, enough for approximately 2,000 photos.
Prime Photos, as the new service is called, is the newest part of the Prime service package, that costs $99 a year. It is apparently part of the new strategy implemented by Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, willing to lose money on services in order to attract more customers to the Prime system. Customers subscribing to Prime tend to be more active on Amazon, and spend more. Amazon was successful in attracting new subscribers through the Prime video streaming service, and customers signing up for this were more often moving on to buy products from the Amazon store. Amazon invested significant amounts in its video streaming service to make it more attractive for subscribers, including creating original and exclusive content. Prime Photos looks like the next premium offer to attract more customers to the Prime service, that will hopefully contribute to increasing Amazon’s sales.