Amazon Channels: Unbundled live sport comes to Prime Video

It's much more flexible than Sky

You can pick the channels you want to watch and only pay for them

Amazon has launched Channels in the UK, allowing you to watch live TV through Prime Video.

The company is hoping to lure in customers by offering increased flexibility.

Channels takes a very different approach to Sky, which forces customers to pay for access to bundles of channels, even if they only plan to watch one of them.

Amazon Channels lets you pick the channels you want to watch and only pay for them.

It also lets you cancel a subscription at any time, and works through the Amazon Prime Video app on a wide range of devices, including smart TVs, iOS and Android handsets, Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, and Fire tablets and games consoles, as well as on the web.

You’ll need to pay a fee between £1.49 and £9.99 per month – on top of the £79 annual Prime video membership fee, or £7.99 per month – to access the channels, which include Eurosport Player, Discovery and ITV Hub+.

There are over 40 channels to choose from, but the line-up of options (full list here) isn’t especially compelling right now.

Eurosport is arguably the pick of the bunch, and costs £6.99 per month. Amazon says that will include all matches of the French Open tennis

You can also choose to pay £3.99 per month for ITV without adverts, or £9.99 for a channel called Daily Burn.

Amazon, however, says additional subscriptions will become available “in the coming months”.

If the company manages to improve what’s on offer, Channels could prove popular amongst users who want to subscribe to a handful of particular channels.

Any more than that and things could get expensive, which would defeat one of the main points of Channels.

“For the first time, Prime members in the UK and Germany will be able to choose to watch premium TV channels without having to sign up to a bundle or a contract, giving them the freedom to pay for only what they want to watch," said Alex Green, the managing director of Amazon Channels in Europe.

“From live sport to Bollywood, arthouse cinema to reality TV, and award-winning TV shows from popular channels like Discovery and ITV, Amazon Channels gives power back to customers to choose exactly what they want to watch.”