Amazon will let you easily share clips from its Prime Video content

Amazon has announced that it’ll let you easily share video clips showing up to 30 seconds of some of its Prime Video content, right from the iOS app. The feature will only be available for a very limited number of shows initially, but letting users share video from shows is a very different attitude than the one displayed by some other streaming providers.

According to Amazon’s press release, its video-sharing feature will be available on iOS devices. When you’re watching a show, the Share Clip button will show up alongside the rest of your controls. Tapping it will create a 30-second video clip, which you can then fine-tune to make sure it contains the part of the show you’re trying to share. From there, you can share it using iOS’s built-in sharing feature, sending it to a friend over iMessage, or posting it on social media.

Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a question about the feature’s availability on Android. Amazon’s press release says that the feature is “currently available,” but the share button didn’t show up when we looked for it using the latest version of the Prime Video app.

It seems like an obvious feature for any streaming service to add — people genuinely like sharing clips from the shows they’re watching, and them doing so is basically free marketing for that show. However, Amazon’s competitors like Hulu and Netflix go in pretty much the exact opposite direction: when you take a screenshot while watching one of their shows, the video content just ends up blacked out, leaving you with just the subtitles if you have them turned on.

While this is perhaps an understandable tactic for third-party content (Netflix’s download feature also has some limitations on which shows you can download), for original shows made by the streaming services themselves, it feels like a missed opportunity to let people do marketing for them.

Amazon says you can only share clips from The Wilds, Invincible, Fairfax, and season one of The Boys to start, but it will add more movies and shows later. It’s unclear if we’ll end up getting this feature for any non-Amazon content on Prime Video in the future.