I updated my list of Bollywood movies on Amazon Prime with some pretty major changes. Over the last several months, lots of Indian movies’ streaming contracts with Amazon have expired and not been renewed, meaning they are no longer available to watch for free with a Prime membership. Many of the titles are still available for rent, but loads are just gone from Amazon in the US entirely.

And when I say lots of contracts expired, I mean LOTS. Approximately 75% of the Indian titles available on Prime earlier this year are gone. At its largest, Prime’s catalog included about 3,600 Indian movies and comedy specials. My Amazon Prime page got so big that it routinely crashed my WordPress editor. After spending the last few months pulling expired content from my Prime page, I’ve found that the catalog is down to just under 1,000 Indian movies (plus about 55 TV shows).

The caveat here is that Amazon’s catalog is such a pain to navigate that I am undoubtedly missing some titles. (If it was any less annoying, I wouldn’t need to maintain my list in the first place.) But it’s clear that Amazon Prime’s Indian collection no longer dwarfs Netflix’s Indian catalog by the massive margin that it used to. Netflix has around 675 Indian movies and comedy specials at present, plus 44 TV shows/anthology series (excluding content for kids, which I list on my Netflix page but not my Prime page).

I should also note that, because Amazon is a lot less diligent about catalog maintenance than Netflix, there are a lot of duplicate entries. I found 80 titles listed more than once, plus another 30 titles in my list are separate 4K UHD versions of pre-exisiting entries. So Amazon’s Prime Indian catalog is really more like 870 titles.

Anyway, culling the expired entries from my Amazon page was a long, long, long project that should result in a more easily navigable and accurate list. I’m happy with the results, but boy am I glad to be done! — Kathy