Amazon Prime’s New Bollywood Channel: Heera

Update: Read my full review of Amazon’s Heera Channel

Amazon just delivered another way to stream Bollywood movies. Heera is a new Amazon Video channel dedicated to Indian content that features more than 200 Hindi films.

Amazon Channels are add-ons to Amazon Prime that feature wider catalogs of films and shows than are included with the regular Prime package. They come with an additional subscription fee per channel, on top of the required Amazon Prime membership. You can’t subscribe to Amazon’s Heera channel without a Prime membership.

The amount of Indian content available for free with Amazon Prime is pretty minimal: 25 titles, and that includes documentaries and movies in languages other than Hindi. The Heera Channel adds 380 titles across five languages, including 206 Hindi movies, 70 Tamil films, 67 Bengali movies, 23 Marathi films, and 14 Telugu movies.

What’s more, Heera has recent blockbusters like Kapoor & Sons, Sultan, and Fan. None of those titles are presently available on Netflix, so Heera can help you catch up on the biggest hits of 2016.

If you’re not already an Amazon Prime member, click here to sign up for a 30-day free trial. Once you’re signed up for Prime, head to the Heera Channel page to sign up for a 7-day free trial of the streaming video channel. The regular subscription fee for Heera is $4.99 per month.

Since I already subscribe to Prime just for the free two-day shipping, paying another $4.99 per month for Heera seems like a good deal, at least in the short term. The value of any streaming service depends on the quality of its catalog, and I’ll be investigating Heera’s more thoroughly in the coming days. The channel subscription is month-to-month, so you can cancel anytime.

If you were going to join Prime just for the sake of Heera, it would cost you $15.98 per month: $10.99 for the Prime membership and $4.99 for the Heera Channel subscription. A full-year Prime membership costs $99 (or $8.25/month), dropping the monthly cost with a Heera subscription to $13.24. If you won’t use the other things Prime has to offer — like free shipping and access to the full Prime Video catalog — month-to-month is the way to go.

I’ll do a more in-depth investigation of Heera’s catalog and how it compares to the other streaming services in the future. [Update: Here it is!] In the meantime, this new streaming option is worth celebrating. The more Bollywood movies, the merrier!

4 thoughts on “Amazon Prime’s New Bollywood Channel: Heera

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