Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th unless you pay extra for ad-free
Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th unless you pay extra for ad-free
Get ready for ads — or pony up an extra $2.99 each month.
“We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership,”
The double-speak is relatively subtle, but it's always interesting to see how much work they put into gaslighting their customers:
- "No action is required from you..." - yes, Amazon hopes we do nothing, but Amazon unilaterally changed the assumptions underlying agreement, so "no action" is an acquiescence to a materially worse reality for us and a better one for Amazon.
- "...there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership" - yes, no additional dollars are required because Amazon is now selling our time and attention, but that is still a new "fee" we are paying.
Pretty gross, Amazon.
When they announced this, it was the last straw for me with Amazon that caused me to finally cancel Prime, which I've paid for annually since it was first offered. Things I've been complacently shrugging off until now:
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their delivery misses/delays have gotten consistently worse over the past year and a half
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they screwed up my combined music library when they changed Amazon Music, which was working great before the change
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Audible keeps pushing up-sale subscriptions I don't want, and is inconsistently working with Android Auto now (but was fine until about a year ago)
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Prime Video ads and up-sale "channels"
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book editions (especially textbook editions): they limit the ability to re-sell old editions of textbooks when newer editions are currently in print. Many classes specify old editions because that's what the curricula and syllabi have built around and the profs can take responsibility for validating the content. This is a serious issue with the number of errors that manage to get past editors for math and science texts, and they publish new editions for cash grabs when no actual new or useful information has been added.
They really don't have to do much to keep me complacent tbh - just stop breaking things that already work(ish). Find whatever the deliverable requirements were in like 2015 and just return to those.
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Amazon has been progressively getting worse and worse. I was not a member of Prime for the video. It was a nice perk.
The combination of Amazon making it hard to search for things to buy, the huge amount of low quality crap for sale with confusing descriptions, and this most recent change of putting in place ads if I do not pay an additional fee has led me to cancel my subscription.
They have taken the enshittification too far. Good bye Amazon. Hello Home Depot, Target, et al.
oooh yay more content to collect from torrents. Bye Bye Prime.
Remember the times when we paid for such a service to get rid of ads? By now I cancelled my prime membership.
Nice to know I can finally cancel Prime though. The entire value proposition has now gone. Free shipping is hugely conditional (and prices are artificially jacked to cover it in the first place), and now they want to put the worst thing on the internet (ads) into the only component of Prime I still sorta kinda use sometimes. I'd rather keep the $140 a year or whatever.
Amazon has turned to utter shit these days. They've been requiring you to show your ID to get a refund. Getting asked by some Indian dude who I can barely understand a picture of my government issued ID sure doesn't feel comforting.
Oh look. Another reason for piracy.
I don’t use Amazon much anymore anyway, because the products are overwhelmed with cheap, poor quality trash you couldn’t peddle on alibaba and completely worthless, largely faked reviews and ratings. I order once or twice a year some replacement cable or adapter I can’t find anywhere else reasonably quick, but that’s pretty much it, so canceling over this ad bullshit doesn’t really hurt me much.
Next on the list is my Netflix sub, which I largely use just for oldtrek reruns as second screen background noise while I use my computer. I could probably, uh, procure those shows fairly easy, or splurge on a collectors edition and would still save money.
What a bunch of cunts. FFS, it is never enough. Their return policy sucks now, too. It used to be that if Amazon fucked up your order, they'd refund you and you could keep the product. It made ordering online a relatively risk-free proposition. Now, they won't refund you until you ship it back, even if it is their fuck up, which really kills the convenience factor. Plus, you get to over-pay for most things. What's not to love?
Amazon wants us to learn how to safely pirate? We'll ok if that's what they want.
Enshitification continues to march ever boldly onward.
You guys should have the same reaction to all bad software news. It would be consistent.
Thankfully, much of Amazons content shows up on Usenet so I can just download the ad-free versions there and then watch it.
time to stop paying for that shit
Say less.
Yarrr, this be some bullshit.
Hoist the sails.
🏴☠️
No point in paying for Prime Video when other services like Tubi or even Pluto TV offer free movies/shows with ads built-in. When I realized that it was easy to cancel.
Probably going to work. Just another company trying to wring money from their user base since they can't reasonably grow. So many people were like "oh I'm cancelling Netflix if I can't share it" and then it was record sign ups for them and overall more money.
They are doing this right before The Boys comes back on and somewhat during Invincibles part 2 airing. People will be annoyed and pay the upcharge.
And like me pirating those still won't change much since I already was.
Bummer. Not because of the extra $3, honestly I'll probably just pay it. But because until now Prime programming has been able to operate with a certain freedom. I know 0 people with prime for the video (as opposed to the free delivery) so they were willing to take risks with the shows.
Solos and Tales from the Loop are both amazing works of art that would never have shown up on network TV, or Netflix which would much rather make cheap mass appeal shows with little depth. Even more shows with wider appeal (e.g. The Expanse) might not survive the TV Executive mindset now that they have a reason to care about the number of views as a primary metric, over user happiness.
And honestly, it all baffles me, I will gladly subscribe to a streaming service for one great show. Produce 3 or 4 a year and I'm subscribed for good. If I wanted an endless string of medicore baking reality shows, I'd get cable again.
Oh well.
I
hate
ads. I will gladly let go of anything I lose when I drop it.
Ads have been designed by psychologists to be as Intrusive and stimulating as possible.
I barely watch anything anyway, so good bye TV, I've suffered thee long enough
Permanently Deleted
Prime's entire UI already sucks dick. I can't even tell which shows/movies I can watch without having to pay, rent, or subscribe. Like mfer I'm paying to watch whatever Amazon has to offer. I only use it for The Boys, Reacher, and Invincible. Even with how much I would love to support these shows, fuck Amazon.
- 🏴☠️
FYI here is a site with instructions on how to cancel your prime membership since it's not the easiest thing to find.
I was able to cancel on the mobile app using this same process.
And bring that keg of mead on board with ya, ya dastardly scallywags 🏴☠️
Amazon Prime currently costs $14.99 each month or $139 annually. (Prime Video can be subscribed to individually for $8.99/month.) The new charge for ad-free streaming would bring Prime to just under $18, and would push standalone Prime Video to just under $12.
So you're going to pay for ads? Why even sell such a service?
As soon as I saw this I cancelled immediately. I’ve been a member since, um, ever?
Well, they can fuck right off.
Ha, I just cancelled my prime. Nailed it.
Canceled. And long overdue I’ll admit
Sail the seven seas!
Amazon Prime Podcasts wants you to know that ads are bad and they offer them as free*. But here they are talking out the other side of their bean counters saying that ads aren't a problem.
- The fast talking at the end of the ad says "some podcasts may contain ads."
Even though I don't have Prime, Amazon's moves are making other sites more attractive. Walmart has been pretty good recently, offering 2-3 day shipping at no additional cost in my experience, along with a better app UI/UX. Now that Amazon has upped the minimum for free shipping, the only edge it holds over Walmart is the wider selection.
The shitshow of video streaming continues!
With this Amazon is taking a page from Nintendo's play book.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th.
No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership,” the company wrote.
Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements.
The rest of the email summarizes the many benefits of a Prime subscription — no doubt an attempt to keep customers from cancelling over this decision.
The move comes as competing streaming services continue to raise subscription rates across the board.
The monthly cost of Amazon Prime isn’t changing, but if you want to preserve the same experience you have today starting on January 29th, you’ll end up paying more.
The original article contains 282 words, the summary contains 145 words. Saved 49%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
its been fun watching all these streaming bullets whiz by me and my giant smokin' NAS. i feel like neo!
but really, who didnt see this coming the day they announced their service?
Just before our yearly subscription ends. I’m busy ripping and saving what we like for the next month and finally canceling prime this year, this is just the added motivation to remember how much it sucks.
My membership is up in a week or so. I was looking into the Walmart equivalent as a replacement, but they've proven to be even worse. I don't know where to go from here.
I'm not a daily Amazon user. Maybe one or two orders per month. But when I need those things, they can be tough to find at brick and mortar.
Stremio + Torrentio
FFS, at least give me some quality programming for once.
In a word: yarrrrr
I'd forgotten they were gonna start doing this. I've got Amazon for the shipping there video has always been leaking. I use it maybe twice a year. They're probably trying to delay a price increase to Amazon and increase revenue.
If the price was slightly higher and it'd remove ads on twitch, I might buy it
Amazon replacements:
- Audiobooks: Libro.fm (no DRM)
- eBooks: eBooks.com (specifically, their DRM-free section)
- Shopping: basically any major online retailer's website
- Electronics: System76 (for gaming machines), ThinkPenguin (for FOSS machines)
- Groceries: your local grocer, lol.
As for video streaming, it's going to take a breakup of the Big Tech monopolies via revival of anti-trust laws to fix that. Hear the first chapter of The Internet Con (skip to 2m5s) by Cory Doctorow for more on that.
There is no change to the current price of your Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* that you can sign up for here.
Then there is a price change you damn dimwit, you just gave the shitty tier the same pricing as the old normal tier, and amped up the normal tier by $3.00. I absolutely hate the wording for this, you just know it was to be able to not release the ad membership at a lower price.
I've already canceled my Amazon prime subscription. I'm just waiting for it to expire in March
*unless you're not a customer
Presently, every time i dive into az video i find nothing and that my time spent was in vain... so now they want me to pay even more for this added misery? Easy decision... I'm out.
try strm.io
eh, I don't really care. It's a gimme with prime. TBH I rarely watch anything on it. The only thing I'm watching right now is the current season of Reacher.
Fortunately a VPN is like 30 quid a year. Jellyfin and Radarr are my jam now.
I've kept Netflix and Disney+ for now. I was looking to cancel one for a while, and Amazon made that an easy choice. There's fucking nothing on it at the best of times.
What a weird wording. They're increasing the price and introducing ad supported tier.
Permanently Deleted
The only reason I still have Prime Video is because of a super weird bug where it tries to charge an already expired card. Somehow, it doesn't register as expired and I can just "renew" it every month
Lol time to unprime
This may be a shocker to many of you but it costs money to produce TV shows.
Cable was lucrative because of the subscription fees and the fact that channels could still run ads. People are now expecting to pay $10 a month for access to everything ad-free when previously they'd have to pay multiple times this amount to watch shows at scheduled times, and still sit through ad breaks. There was no such thing as an online on-demand catalogue just fifteen years ago.
Now imagine that networks are making far less money per viewer, have to pump out shitloads of original content to keep people subscribed (and in the case of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others, mitigate the risk of copyright holders jacking up fees for third party content), can't run ads to supplement their income and have to deal with huge levels of inflation because governments had to print a fucktonne of money to bail us out of a financial crisis and a global pandemic.
Piracy has raised a generation of entitled cheapskates that refuse to pay for content, and these are the people who are most likely going to break a lot of studios and publishers.
The only real saving grace here is that this could be the downfall of Disney, which would be a net boon for copyright reform. Disney are the core reason why US copyright law is so fucked and why we're only now close to seeing Steamboat Willie (first Mickey Mouse cartoon from 1924) enter the public domain.