Sky Cinema vs Amazon Prime | How their catalogues compare

Jonathan Victoria • 24 Jan 2024 Features

Two services with a lot to offer - but who has the most?

Sky and Amazon both have large and respectable streaming services that contain a seemingly never-ending yet never-enough amount of movies and series.

With so much to offer, it can take effort to pick between the two should you find yourself having to do so.

Here, we are putting the two services head-to-head as we look at Sky Cinema vs Amazon Prime - how their catalogues compare.

Sky Cinema vs Amazon Prime: Movies

Both services continuously update their catalogues, adding and removing content when necessary. While this keeps it fresh, it can be anyone for users when their favourite watch disappears, but that’s the same with all services.

Amazon Prime holds a commanding lead in the amount of movies on offer, with over 9000 films to Sky Cinema’s 1000+.

But something common between the two is not every movie is free to watch. Many of those Amazon Prime movies aren’t actually available to stream for free but instead can be bought or rented. The same goes for Sky Cinema, where they have many films that you must pay to watch.

But both still have a great range of movies you can watch for free, particularly new releases, and that’s where Sky Cinema may have a slight advantage.

Every month, a batch of Sky Cinema new releases gets added which often includes some of that year's or the previous year’s biggest blockbusters.

They are added to their on-demand catalogue or are shown on the Sky Cinema Premiere channel.

And that brings it to the last point for Sky Cinema, TV channels. While Amazon Prime is purely a streaming service delivering mainly on-demand content, Sky has 11 Cinema channels showing different categories of movies.

Whether that is an advantage or not is up to the user, but in our opinion, sometimes it’s nice to throw it back to the old days, checking out the schedule and planning a movie night around when a certain film will be on TV.

Sky Cinema vs Amazon Prime: Originals

Starting with Sky, TV shows such as A League of Their Own are popular among Sky’s audience and they have won awards for other series such as Chernobyl back in 2019.

As for movies, you’ll find many films with the banner ‘Sky Originals’ on them, including 2023's A Good Person starring Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman, amongst other great movies.

Over on Prime's side, The Boys is a multi-award-winning show that is incredibly popular with fans for many reasons and is so big that many attribute it to being the ‘MCU killer’, displaying superheroes in a way that had never been done before.

They also acquired the services of the old Top Gear gang back in 2016, signing Jeremy Clarkson, Jamey May and Richard Hammond to contracts which would allow them to shoot a new popular version of Top Gear named The Grand Tour as well as have their own docuseries alongside - Clarkson’s Farm has turned out to be a big hit with all.

Amazon owns an in-house studio, Amazon MGM Studios, and after a merger with MGM Holdings, they now own many great movies that fly under the Amazon banner. This includes the Oscar-winning Manchester by the Sea, as well as 2023’s surprise hit Saltburn.

Sky Cinema vs Amazon Prime: Costs

On to costs now and these two couldn’t be any different to how much you will spend on either one, but that is owing to the fact that they are rather different services.

Amazon Prime is a subscription service and with it comes Prime Video. It currently costs £8.99 per month or £95 annually.

As for Sky Cinema, you have to purchase a Sky TV package that includes Cinema with it. Sky TV comes with either Sky Glass, Stream or Sky Q. Once you have one of those, you can get Sky Cinema as an add-on.

Similarly, you can purchase packages that include it all in one, making it easier and often coming out as a better value deal.

This ultimately does make Sky a lot more expensive, but also what you're getting from it is a lot more depending on the package.

Plus, there is a lot more to add to your Sky package, with Sky Sports and Kids channels available to be tacked on whenever you'd like.