20% off one movie (digital purchase) at Google Play

If you are using Google Play, check your emails or notifications or navigate the store to see if you are eligible for this automated promotion, it gets you 20% off the digital purchase of a single movie of your choice until 11/30/16. This happens automatically in the cart there after you click on the promotional link. There’s no coupon code to manually enter. You will see during checkout whether your order will qualify or not for the promotional discount. Here’s a screenshot explaining the terms:

google_play_20off_movie

November 21, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: ,

Nov 20-26: Buy $25 Google Play Gift Card, Get 500 Plenti points back

The Google Play gift cards are not discounted as often as iTunes, so it’s a sale-a-bration when they do! And they do indeed for the week of November 20-26 (in 2016) at Rite Aid brick and mortar stores. You buy a $25 Google Play plastic gift card, and receive 500 Plenti points, which have the $5 equivalent buying power in future purchases. The points will be ready to use in your account the morning after the purchase. Limit two per customer during this week. You get confirmation all is well at the cash register receipt. So this is a virtual 20% off discount ~ assuming you’ll have no issue spending the 500 Plenti points 🙂

November 19, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

AMEX Offers: Spend $5+ at iTunes, Get $5 Statement Credit

If you have an American Express credit card and like to shop at iTunes, check your latest AMEX Offers! Their new offer is pretty good, if you make $5 or more in purchases until 12/31/16, you will receive a $5 AMEX statement credit. You don’t even have to spend the $5 in a single transaction. This is a cumulative offer. It has a limit of one per customer during the promotion.

amex_itunes_5back

As with other offers like this, you have to manually first add it to your account by clicking the “Add to Card” button in the Offers section of the AMEX website. If you have more than one card on the same login, make sure you are activating it on the card you intend to do so.

Note also that while the offer is good until 12/31/16, the time frame to add it to your card is often shorter, because they sometimes have a limited number of activations. To cut a long story short, if you are planning of using it, add it to your account as soon as you see it, don’t assume it will be available to sign up for until the end of the promotional window.

Having said that, once you add it to your card, the offer remains in your account until the expiration date. The shorter time frame is for adding to your account, not using it (once you activate it).

November 11, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: ,

Free until 11/7/16 ebook: “Spin” by Robert Charles-Wilson (Tor)

Amazon is not the only one offering free e-books every month. While the Kindle First choice can be picked up until the end of every month by Prime members, the free e-book choice at the Tor eBook Club is only available for the first few days of every month. For this month, good until November 7 in 2016, you can get the book titled “Spin”, the start of a new science-fiction trilogy, by author Robert Charles-Wilson. You have to enter your email address and country to get the freebie.

The e-book is available in two digital formats, ePUB and MOBI (of Kindle interest). You download those files and then it’s up to you to load them on your e-reader. Remember, you can also email ebooks to your Kindle, you don’t have to connect it via microUSB.

November 5, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: ,

Kindle First choices for November 2016 are here: Pick One From Six For FREE (Prime Members)

Yes dear calendar aficionados, a new month has arrived! It is November 2016, and with it, among many other things, we have a new set of six pre-release Kindle e-books for Prime members to pick from, as part of their monthly Kindle First benefit. You pick one of the six for FREE and you can start reading it right away. These e-books will be officially released to the general public on December 1st, and then you can buy them rest of them if you like more than one. If you are not a Prime member, you can purchase one of the six right now for $2.

Without further delay, the six choices are…

  • “The Food Of Love” by Amanda Prowse in Family Drama (no, not a Valentine’s cookbook!)
  • “Nirzona (A Love Story)” by Abidah El-Khalieqy, Annie Tucker in Literary Fiction
  • “Ocean of Storms” by Christopher Mari, Jeremy K. Brown in Scifi Thrillers
  • “The Odds of Loving Grover Cleveland” by Rebekah Crane in Contemporary Fiction
  • “Walk Into Silence” by Susan McBride in Mysteries
  • “Knight Kyle and the Magic Silver Lance (Adventures Beyond Dragon Mountain)” in Kids books

Since these are pre-release books, they have very few reviews right away, so if none of the authors or subjects or titles scream “pick me now”, you can wait for 1-2 weeks for more people to read them and post reviews, and then use the reviews to make an educated guess on which one to pick. You have until November 30 in 2016 to make a choice, just don’t wait until 11:59pm of that day 🙂

PS: I just realized that abbreviations of some genres totally change their meaning, “Lit fiction” is not quiet the same thing, and “Contempt fiction” is also something totally different 🙂

November 1, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , , ,

T-Mobile Tuesday freebies for 11/1/16: Digital Magazine, Movie Rental, Frosty

The freebies for the November 1st in 2016 T-Mobile Tuesdays have been revealed and it is a trio of freebies. One you can eat, two you can digitally view. They are (visual spoilers first):

tmobile_tuesday_november1

  • free digital subscription to “Electrify” travel magazine$5 in movie rentals at FandangoNOW
  • the usual Wendy’s Small Frosty

The “Electrify” bi-annual digital magazine is offered for the first time during the T-Mo Tuesdays, but the other two are returnees from last week. The small Wendy’s frosty is one of the most frequent offers, while FandangoNOW’s Movie Rental credit is back for its second week.

Unlike Vudu, the $5 FandangoNOW credit can only be used towards movie rentals, not towards the purchase of movies or TV seasons or episodes. They have plenty of movies for rental though, and if you go for older movies, you can rent multiple with your $5 credit. As usual, make sure you check to see if they are available through any of your streaming services or premium movie channels, so you don’t waste your credit on something you can already watch for free.

October 29, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: ,

Cordcutter Alert: Netflix Gift Cards at Rite Aid during Black Friday (effective 20% off discount)

Netflix prices have gone up, but Black Friday comes to the rescue! If you participate in the Plenti Rewards program (or do not object to joining, it’s free – [see introduction], and have Rite Aid B&M stores near you, you can get a nice deal on prepaid Netflix gift cards. You buy a $50 Netflix Gift Card, and receive 800 Plenti points which are the spending equivalent of $8 towards a future purchase. Assuming you can spend the Plenti points (Rite Aid, Macy’s, Exxon-Mobil, etc), you are getting a virtual 20% off discount on the Netflix prices that are paid with the gift card.

Better yet, this promotion is limit 2 for the promotional period (Thursday to Saturday during Black Friday 2016 week). Rite Aid stores typically are out of the way of major shopping areas, so you are not going to fight mall traffic for these 🙂 $100 in Netflix gift cards is, assuming you are on the $10/month plan, ten months of Netflix!

PS: YES, you can add this to your own account, you don’t have to “gift it” to another person!

October 27, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , , , , ,

Free Movies with Ads from Vudu

If you like to stream movies but hate to pay a monthly fee or buy/rent movies or you are looking for specific movies that are not already available through your current services, there is a new alternative now, a new services launched by Vudu called Movies On Us, or perhaps a more realistic name for it, “Vudu with Ads” 🙂

There are hundreds of movies available, along with nearly 600 documentaries and two dozen TV shows. TV shows are its weakest point, the most famous of them is Syfy’s Dresden Files. Documentaries are perhaps your best bet with this service, as they feature a variety of topics, including some good choices on music (both performance and meta).

Movies are older but there’s a lot of them, and they are recognizable, it’s not like it’s filled with straight to DVD movies 🙂 You get titles such as “Carrie”, “Margin Call”, “Phantom of the Opera”, “Star Dust”, “Aeon Flux”, Star Trek Nemesis”, “Dead Man Walking”, “Midnight Cowboy”, “Narc” and more.

Overall, this is a good idea if you can stomach ads and/or don’t like to pay 🙂

October 20, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

Free Horror Pilot Episodes on Vudu

In addition to Walking Dead Season 1 being on sale, just in time for Halloween, the Vudu video streaming service is offering a nice variety of pilot episodes for various horror-themed TV shows for FREE. That’s right, these are FREE and in HD and without ads. They are yours, they are not rentals (TV episode rentals are very very rare online these days). Note: some of them are not pilots but the starts of a particular season, as some shows are more season anthologies.

You can see the complete list which includes among others:

  • Preacher, Ash Vs Evil Dead, Supernatural
  • Z Nation, The Strain, Teen Wolf
  • The Exorcist, GRIMM, Scream, Vampire Diaries
  • Walking Dead (S6E1), American Horror Story (S1), Penny Dreadful
  • new from Syfy: Channel Zero and Aftermath and Van Helsing
  • Dusk to Dawn, and many more

NOTE: this is a limited time promotion for Halloween 2016!

October 18, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

Walking Dead Season 1 for $1 (digital HD, 6 episodes)

If you are curious about the whole “Walking Dead” Season 7 hype and you want to get started with the show, we have good news for your zombie needs. Season 1 (six episodes) is now on sale for 99c in HD at Amazon Instant Video and Google Play. That’s the whole season for 99c. This is a limited time zombified offer!

October 18, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With:

Samsung Book Deals for October 2016 are up

A new month does not only bring new Kindle First choices but also “Samsung Book Deals”. These are not as common because to get them you have to have an eligible Samsung device, and you have to download the Kindle app from Samsung’s own app-store. A plus of that is that it is more S-Pen friendly than the normal Kindle apps.

Which devices are eligible and for how long depends on which device you purchased and when. The fastest way to find out is to download the app and look under the “Samsung Book Deals” section. If you are eligible, their price will be $0.00. After you pick one of them, the price of the remaining ebooks will be their normal price. If you make a mistake, fear not, you can go to your Amazon Kindle account page (eg amazon.com/myk) and void the transaction.

samsung_book_deals_october_2016

[Read more…]

October 16, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

99c HD Movie Rentals at Amazon (limited time offer)

If you like to rent movies digitally (and you actually end up watching them within the 30 days before they expire), Amazon has a hot new 99c Weekend Rental promotion. These are ad-free movies in HD that you can watch at some point within 30 days after you rent them. If you don’t watch them, you don’t get a refund, you lose the money.

There are some well-known movies, no blockbusters obviously, but still recognizable, such as:

  • “Allegiant”, part of the Divergent series
  • “Keanu”, from the Key and Peele duo, also of original MadTV fame
  • “Dirty Grandpa”, De Niro and Efron, G-d Save us all from this movie 🙂
  • “Money Monster”, “Marauders”, “Criminal” and more

TIP: Better yet, if you are a Prime member, you can automatically use the “slow shipping” digital credits towards the payment for these rentals, so you may end up paying nothing out of your pocket if you have some credit. It is typically $1 per slow-shipment, so it’s essentially one movie per credit. The credits do expire eventually, so if you are close to expiration (check the emails that Amazon sends when these are earned, there is no simple way to get to the expiration dates as far as I know), this may be one way to use them without spending any additional money.

PS: you can rent as many of these as you want.

October 14, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With:

25% off Star Trek Beyond Digital Copy with Vudu coupon for T-Mobile customers

If you previously redeemed any of the Vudu $5.50 store credit offers through T-Mobile Tuesdays, check your email address that is associated with your Vudu account. You may find a unique coupon code that gets you 25% off the current price of the brand new “Star Trek Beyond” movie. The current price for the HDX (1080p) digital copy is $20, so the coupon make it $15.

vudu_startrek_beyond

The coupon must be used by 10/17/16 at 11:59pm ET and can only be used once and only for this particular title.

Regardless of where you buy the movie, Vudu is planning a Viewing Party using the social media hashtag “#VuduViewingParty” at 9pm Eastern on Friday 10/7/16. Vudu won’t be airing the movie, you have to own it on your own and play it on your own, and follow people’s commentary using the social media hashtag.

October 6, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , , ,

Hulu with Ads for $6 per month (for 1-year) [NEW CUSTOMERS]

If you don’t mind seeing TV Ads, the Hulu with Ads plan (they call it “Limited Commercials” in such a lovely Orwellian fashion) is having a new promotion, if you are a NEW CUSTOMER, you can get it for $6 per month for the first 12 months, instead of the usual $8 per month. After the first 12 months, you go to $8 per month (or whatever the price will be at that time). There is no parallel promotion for the Ad-Free plan which continues for $12 per month.

My suspicion is that because they sell ads, they are trying to triangulate paying subscribers vs Page Views, and by lowering the monthly price, they can get more people to sign-up, so they’ll have more page views, and sell more ads. That’s why the no-ads plan is not discounted because they can’t offset ads vs subscription.

Regardless, you can cancel any time. The 12 months are just the price guarantee, you don’t have to remain a paying customer for 12 months.

October 3, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: ,

Kindle First choices for October 2016 are up: pick one from six

Time flies dear old friends, we are just three months away from 2017 already. But one of the benefits of time flying is that we have a new month, it’s October 1st, which means a new round of unreleased e-books are offered up on Kindle First. Prime members can select one of the six options for FREE and read it right now (instead of the official November 2016 e-release date). Non-Prime members can purchase one of the options for $2 and read it right away.

kindlefirst_oct2016

And the choices for October 2016 are *imaginary drum roll*

  • “Wake in Winter” by Nadezhda Belenkaya, Andrea Gregovich in Literary Fiction
  • “It is Well: A Novel” by James D. Shipman in Historical Fiction
  • “The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds (The Malayan Series)” by Selina Siak Chin Yoke in Historical Fiction
  • “Before You Leap” by Keith Houghton in Thrillers
  • “Evelyn, After: A Novel” by Victoria Helen Stone in Psychological Suspense
  • “Venom and Vanilla (The Venom Trilogy Book 1)” in Shannon Mayer in Urban Fantasy

As usual, if none of these strike your fancy immediately, you don’t have to rush. You have until October 31st in 2016 to make a choice. They won’t run out since these are digital e-books 🙂 Their review profiles will fill up in the next few are more of the voracious readers go through them and post their reviews. Having said that, don’t wait until 10/31/16 at 11:58pm to decide 🙂

October 1, 2016 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , , ,