You can now log into HBO and Showtime with your Amazon credentials

By Lulu Chang Updated April 21, 2022

amazon channels hbo showtime log in fire tv

TV providers aren’t disappearing — they’re just changing their appearances. The latest to adopt a role similar to the giants of industry of days past is none other than Amazon, darling of the cord-cutting generation, and really, TV provider in disguise. With the update to its Amazon Channels service (which allows Amazon Prime members to subscribe to other entertainment networks including HBO, Showtime, Starz, and Cinemax), users will now be able to log into these networks’ standalone streaming apps using their Amazon credentials, beginning with HBO and Showtime. Basically, it means that rather than entering your cable credentials to log into the HBO or Showtime app, you can just enter your Amazon information.

See? Amazon = TV provider.

Unsurprisingly, when Amazon first launched Channels back in 2015, the goal was actually to compete more with traditional providers. After all, historically speaking, you could only get access to these premium channels if you were paying for a TV subscription. But that’s clearly no longer the case.

HBO told TechCrunch that it launched a new feature last week allowing subscribers through Amazon Channels to access the HBO NOW app. That means that customers can now use their Amazon credentials to log onto the app through desktop, mobile, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon mobile Kindle and Fire TV devices, PlayStation 3 and 4, and Samsung Smart TVs. And soon, this feature will also come to Roku and Xbox 360 soon.

The Showtime Anytime app also supports Amazon login, which has actually been around since February.

To be fair, Amazon isn’t the first company to offer such functionality. As TechCrunch points out, both Sling TV and PlayStation View also allow their viewers to log into various third-party applications using their respective credentials. But all this to say that while the TV providers of yore may be losing ground to streaming services, the TV provider model isn’t going anywhere.

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You can now preorder the Pixel Fold — if you can handle its price

Google Pixel Fold open lifestyle

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You can now video chat with a ChatGPT AI — here’s what it looks like

Call Annie ChatGPT app on an iPhone.

Showing up to a videoconference as your digital avatar can be quite fun. Apple lets you do just that with Memojis during FaceTime. If you want something more ambitious on a different platform, Avatarify will turn into Albert Einstien or Mona Lisa for Zoom calls. But what if you could bring an AI conversation to life? Say, by talking to ChatGPT as if OpenAI’s AI was a CGI person talking to you on a video call?
Well, that’s now possible. Call Annie is an app that turns ChatGPT into Annie, a talking female avatar that doesn’t look like a glitchy visual mess. Developed by Animato.Ai, the app is currently exclusive to iOS 16, but you can also use it on macOS 13 machines with an M-series processor inside.

A ChatGPT-powered video call in action
https://twitter.com/frantzfries/status/1651316031762071553?s=20
Another limitation is that you need at least the iPhone 12 or a later model to start a video call with Annie because the real-time conversion of linguistic prompts into visual cues draws power from Apple’s Neural Engine.
The app’s makers claim that talking to Annie “face-to-face in real time time feels more natural and faster than typing and reading text.” So far, the sample videos we have seen on social media, like the one above, show a fairly convincing video call interface.
Right now, Annie appears to be pretty good at holding a fluent conversation, even though the voice sounds robotic, and the phrase pausing could also use some work. The answers, however, are typical of the answers you would get while texting back-and-forth with ChatGPT. And given enough time and improved voice training, Call Annie interactions can become a lot more natural-sounding.
It all brings back memories of the sci-fi flick Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with one such AI. One user asked on Reddit whether Annie can have a “memory” system that will turn it into a smarter “friend,” to which the app developers replied with “soon.”
https://twitter.com/jakedahn/status/1651285054591750144
This is only the beginning for Annie
Users who have tried the app note that it occasionally flubs the pronunciation of words, but once corrected, it also learns right away. One user described this experience as “scary stuff.”Another issue it has is with pronouncing words in languages other than English, something that the developers are trying to fix.
Thanks to its ChatGPT smarts, the app’s developers say it can help you with everything from learning and web searches to serving as a tour guide or even a virtual companion. We don’t know if it’s as smart as other virtual partner apps like Replika, but considering the fact that Annie is based on ChatGPT (and its vast data training model), you can have a significantly deeper and fact-driven conversation with Annie.
Animato’s App Store description notes that the AI keeps all conversations “confidential” but hasn’t specified what kind of security measures have been put in place and whether it uses the user conversations for training and refining Annie’s systems.

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Cycler riding while wearing the Amazon Halo View.

Does paying a subscription fee to own and use a piece of hardware feel reassuring? Does that monthly commitment make you feel safe, as the company has income past any original purchase, encouraging it to support and update the product so it never becomes useless?

As Amazon’s decision to end support for its Halo line of health products proves, it absolutely shouldn’t. What it should do, however, is make you seriously consider whether any subscription-based health and fitness product is a good idea at all.
Why Amazon killed Halo