Earlier this week, we crunched the numbers and proved that each hour of Netflix costs users less than an hour of TV. By dividing the monthly price watched by the average hours, we showed that cable is more than three times pricier than Netflix even after you account for the incredible amount of TV that cable subscribers watch.

But Netflix isn't the only streaming service on the block. What about its competitors? Are Hulu or Amazon viewers watching enough content to drive their per-hour price below Netflix's, or does Netflix still offer the cheapest possible solution? We went ahead and crunched the numbers again to find out.

Let's Do Some Math

We established in our last piece

that Netflix costs an average of 20 cents per hour of content viewed, while cable costs 61 cents per hour viewed. We can do the same math with Hulu and Amazon Prime.

According to UBS analysts, Amazon Prime subscribers watch an average of .5 hours of content per day. Prime costs $99/year, the equivalent of $8.25/month (converting to a monthly fee actually costs users more, but since most users pay annually, we'll use this figure). Assuming a 30-day month, Prime viewers watch 15 hours of content and pay 55 cents for each of those hours.

The same UBS study said that Hulu users watch 1.2 hours of content per day. Hulu costs $7.99 per month (for simplicity's sake, we'll leave out the pricier and less popular ad-free option, just as we ignored Netflix's less popular pricing tiers in our last piece). Divide that price by the 36 hours Hulu users watch on average in a 30-day month, and you get 22.2 cents per hour.

Hulu Is Hot on Netflix's Heels, But Amazon Lags Behind

Put it all together and we see that Hulu's price per hour viewed is quite close to Netflix's: Hulu costs just 2.2 cents more per hour than its rival. But Amazon Prime's per-hour price is way behind, finishing closer to cable than it does to its streaming rivals.

Why is Prime so far behind? It's all because of the amount of viewing. Amazon's annual price is equal to $8.25/month, which lands between Hulu and Netflix, but its users' stingy viewing habits make the per-hour price much higher. That's not a huge surprise, because Amazon lumps its instant video service in with other perks under its Amazon Prime subscribers. It's very likely that some subscribers are drawn to Prime because of things like free two-day shipping, and it's possible that those subscribers just aren't bothering to stream at all.

Even with its low viewing numbers, though, Prime still beats cable by a comfortable margin. Cable viewers watch the most TV of all, but no amount of hours can make cable's insanely high prices look good. Cable costs almost as much each month, on average, as Amazon Prime does for the whole year.