Going on a long plane ride or a car trip across country and want to take your favorite TV show or movie with you for entertainment? Well, for most consumers this either meant buying a digital copy and putting it in some sort of storage, because most streaming services would eat up a lot of charges (can you say “Roaming?”) Recognizing this problem, Amazon now offers members the ability to download a TV show or movie to their mobile device that can be watched with or without Internet connectivity.

Amazon Prime is a premium subscription service offered by Amazon for $99 a year that includes free two-day shipping, access to free, unlimited streaming of music and video, as well as a lot of other perks. Offline download and play is yet another perk.

Amazon calls this “wherever you go” and it’s part of the relaunch of the Amazon Video app.

“Downloading is easy,” reads the page that tells Prime members to get the Amazon Video app from the iTunes App Store (iOS) or Amazon Underground (Android). Consumers who own an Amazon Fire tablet or a Fire phone already have it installed on their devices and can just tap “Videos” to access this function.

Prime members can simply browse or search to the TV show or movie that they want, locate the “Download” button or icon, and it will save the video to the device. Amazon suggests that users leave their device plugged into a charger while the download finishes.

Afterwards, the downloaded videos would be stored on that device and available via the app to watch at any time. No Internet streaming necessary.

The video can be downloaded in one of three quality settings (SD, HD, and UHD).

The Amazon Video app has a 72 hour viewing period.

There is a catch, however. Once a customer begins viewing a video offline, a warning pops up that it will become unavailable in 72 hours. Reconnecting to the Internet and opening the app again within that time period resets any timers.

This adds to the number of options that consumers have for offline viewing. Already Amazon Prime, Google Play Video, and iTunes allow customers to pay for individual videos and download them to their devices. What Amazon Prime is doing here is providing a way for what would otherwise be only streaming video to be played offline.

Popular streaming video service, Netflix, Inc., however, still requires network connection in order to watch movies and provides no download option.

Featured image credit: Amazon Fire TV, Amazon.com, Inc.