We rely on Amazon Prime Video streaming for pretty much all of our video entertainment including family movie night projected on a wall from my laptop. The selection is great and it’s nice to be able to have a digital library so handy.

The problem was that whenever we played a video, it was extremely “loady” as my kids say. It paused the movie or show and had a loader appear every 30 seconds or so. This became particularly annoying when we used the projector and external speaker and the external speaker turned off when the loading was longer than a couple seconds, making me get up and turn it back on every 10 minutes.

It was a miserable watching experience!

I tried different streaming settings (lower resolution), different browsers (both ad blocking and native Windows browsers), connecting an ethernet cord instead of relying on wifi, a different projector, and closing down all the other applications and shutting down all the other computer processes. Still, nothing seemed to make much of a difference. It was still annoyingly “loady”.

Then, we lost Internet after a storm and looked into alternatives to streaming the video through Amazon.com. On each video page, there’s an option to download, so I thought we could go mooch some wifi somewhere, download the movie, then watch it at home. What I learned was that the download button directs you to the Amazon Prime Video app for Windows (or Mac). This app allows you to download your videos to watch offline, which is really nice. However, it also alleviates the constant loading issue we experience on the Amazon Prime Video website.

Ah-ha!

Now we enjoy streaming movies in all situations including on the projector without the constant stopping and loading. It’s wonderful!