I am so frustrated with Amazon’s Instant Video service. It’s a great resource, in theory, but in practice, it’s an exercise in frustration. Particularly if you’re a member of Amazon Prime – a service I pay for. You expect, when you pay for something, to get a certain level of service. Granted, this is an online company, but the execution of this feature is getting to be more and more of a sore point.

Yesterday, when I blogged about my son August being home sick from school, I mentioned I was using Amazon Instant Video. Today he is home sick again (better, thank you, but we’re acting more on the safe side) and more Amazon streaming videos are going to be in the offering.

While yesterday I became frustrated with the lack of user-friendliness of the interface, today I am downright angry about it. It is almost as if Amazon doesn’t want customers using the service. It is unwieldy and lacks any sort of controls for people to find what they are looking for.

Users should be able to sort videos by rating. I select a decade of available films to choose from, but if I don’t know what decade a film was made, I’m out of luck. Sorting through available Amazon Prime Instant Videos by rating would not only be useful in selecting videos for my son, but also let me know a bit more about a film before I decide if I want to watch it for myself.

Even sorting out a genre by release date is useless. Check out this screen capture.

See those Star Trek movies?Going from the top town we get release dates of 1998, 1982, 1985, 1991 and 1979. Not only are they all out of order with regards to release date, there are many other science fiction movies that were released that are available to view through Amazon Instant Video. Case in point, scrolling down just a little further, we get Explorers and Starman (1985 and 1984, respectively). And Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, released in 2004 in directly under Star Trek: The Motion picture. All supposedly sorted by release date.

Want to sort by title? Not an option.

Why are television series listed by seasons? Why can’t you simply select a series and then the season you wish to watch? Between the various “Star Trek” and “Stargate” series along with “Doctor Who” and double entries for high-definition offerings, it’s almost impossible to find anything.

And here’s a question: Why is Mission: Impossible, Mission: Impossible III and Mission: Impossible _ Ghost Protocol available to watch free through Amazon Prime, but not Mission: Impossible II?

Dear Amazon, please fix your search strings for Amazon Instant Video.