The Great Courses enrich Amazon Prime
Members now can bone up on history, cooking and much more with access to 87 courses
Amazon’s streaming video service has become a destination for binge-watching TV series — The
Wire, Justified and original shows such as Mozart in the Jungle. Now it’s a place to learn about ancient history, religion — even Mozart.
The latest available add-on subscription to Amazon Prime — or the monthly Amazon Video service — is The Great Courses Signature Collection, consisting of 87 courses covering subjects such as philosophy, ancient and modern history, photography, professional development, science and cooking.
Amazon Prime members ($99 annually or $10.99 monthly, includes video and free shipping) and subscribers to Amazon Video ($8.99 monthly) can add the collection for $7.99 monthly. (Note: There’s a seven-day free trial that lets you test the service, too.)
That’s a good deal, considering The Great Courses Plus standalone streaming service, launched last year, costs $179.99 annually ($14.99 each month) or $19.99 for a monthly subscription. This Signature Collection offering on Amazon may have only about 30% of the stand-alone service’s 300 courses, but those include many popular ones, representing about 40% of the most streamed choices, the companies say.
For the Chantilly, Va.-based company, the move to Amazon made sense, says Ed Leon, chief brand officer of The Great Courses. “Launching on Amazon Prime ... is a smart next step because it allows us to reach millions of new customers,” he said.
Each course typically has a dozen or more half-hour lectures on the subject. Want to improve your skills in the kitchen? “The Everyday Gourmet: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Cooking ” has 24 individual video lectures from Chef Bill Briwa of The Culinary Institute of America.
Need to improve your business acumen? Another entry, “Critical Business Skills for Success,” hosted by a quintet of business professors, has 60 lectures on business strategy, disruptive innovations, mergers and acquisitions, analyzing income statements and other financial statements, branding, marketing and social media.
Oh, and about Mozart: In “The 23 Greatest Solo Piano Works,” music historian Robert Greenberg describes what it would have been like to see young Mozart play at the time and breaks down his Piano Sonata in C Minor, K.
457 (the fourth lecture of two dozen). “Mozart single-handedly turned the piano sonata from a small-scale genre intended for amateur amusement into a largescale virtuosic genre,” he says.