from Hacker News

Amazon Prime Video starts showing ads in January unless you pay $2.99/month xtra

by qainsights on 12/26/23, 10:04 PM with 507 comments

• by linsomniac on 12/27/23, 1:29 AM

  I had been on the fence about renewing my decade+ long Prime membership in a couple weeks. The only thing that was seriously tempting me to keep it was Prime Video.

  I have mixed feelings already about Prime Video, as a watching experience I find it quite annoying because I'll find a movie I'd like to watch only to find I have to pay another $5 to watch it. With the other services, I know if a movie comes up on the display, I can watch it without further cost.

  I'm fairly sensitive to adverts, I really don't like seeing them, largely because I've isolated myself from them. The fewer you see, the more unsettling they are, the blatant attractive factor of them, do.not.want. And anther $40/yr is too much.

  Apparently, dropping Prime with the shopping really does not impact the speed of delivery or cost. I'm already often selecting delayed delivery. With the increased prices, it's hard to justify the $140/yr.

• by woodruffw on 12/27/23, 12:55 AM

  This seems to be the sad reality of many paid services: paying is not a guarantee of freedom from advertisement, only a temporary respite. Being a paying customer is a very juicy datapoint, one that every one of these streaming companies eventually decides to capitalize on.

• by rokkitmensch on 12/27/23, 2:08 AM

  Torrent system is alive and well. Mega shout out to seedhost.eu for their one-button panel for everything.

  VLC will even open media over http, so one doesn't even have to mirror it locally from the Netherlands (although I do for the kids content, just to provide them a curated selection).

• by jjcm on 12/26/23, 11:56 PM

  With prices of all streaming crawling upwards, and often multiple services being required to cover the catalog of what you want to watch, purchasing† has become a compelling option again. Realistically, if you're paying for Netflix, Prime, and Disney+, you're looking at a $45/mo bill. With seasons of shows costing around $10-15 to buy, are you better off with streaming? I personally don't watch more than a full season of a show in any given month, and I've just started considering this. One notable benefit - most streaming providers have a larger digital catalog for purchasing than for streaming, meaning you can centralize more.

  The obvious downside though is at some point the show may just magically disappear from your purchased library, if negotiations between the platform and the creator go south††. I'd love to see some laws in this area where "a purchase is a purchase" to prevent this, but for now it's a risk (albeit one with maritime workarounds).

  † or license leasing if you're buying digitally

  †† ie https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6449826?sortBy=best

• by heelix on 12/26/23, 11:13 PM

  The Amazon video experience has gotten bad. You use to be able to do a 'free for me'. Now it is a mix of 'free', ads, and rentals - combined with the netflix style of showing categories of content, highlighting the same shows, obscuring how much content is actually there.

• by rckt on 12/27/23, 4:52 AM

  It was simple not so long ago. You either buy stuff or pirate it. Then everything moved to the subscription model. You don’t own what you’ve bought anymore. And now you have to watch ads while being a paying customer. It feels like pirating was a better option all this time.

  The only “store” I really use nowadays is Bandcamp.

• by tyingq on 12/27/23, 12:18 AM

  Meanwhile, the usability of pirate tools is improving. There's a number of "seed box" providers that put a decent management UI on top of the various pieces you need. And ways to see what's trending (or search the catalog) on Prime, Netflix, Max, etc, and add it to your download queue. A hosted service also trades a fair amount of hassle for a few extra dollars a month.

• by neilv on 12/27/23, 1:22 AM

  1. I absolutely will not watch videos with commercial breaks.

  2. The Prime shipping logo on an item no longer necessarily means 2-day, but frequently means whenever convenient for Amazon.

  3. Anecdotally, customer service changes since Bezos handed over the reins have seemed mixed (some bad, some good).

  Looks like I'm going to cancel my 14.99/month Prime membership, and return to Netflix. Which will also make purchases at Amazon and WFM less attractive.

  Edit: I just canceled Amazon Prime. I figured that canceling was more meaningful than merely mumbling on the Internet that I might.

• by Blackstrat on 12/27/23, 12:42 AM

  Essentially everything Amazon does today costs too much and doesn’t deliver the quality it once did. In my area, Prime delivery usually takes about a week. I live in a large US city. Their book recommendations system has become garbage. Prices are escalating across the board. That is the cost of a monopoly.

• by pbnjeh on 12/27/23, 2:15 AM

  More and more of their offering has been moving to their Freevee ad tier, anyway.

  And if they run the Prime tier ads like they've been running the Freevee tier ads, for me, that means "forget about it".

  Freevee ads, last time I could bring myself to try a show on it, are copious, inserted willy-nilly into the show often at very awkward and disruptive moments, with no forewarning... AND, the quality of the ads and their copy/content is crap. Not just lots of very disruptive ads, but offensive ones.

  Louis Rossman has a recent YouTube video on the severely declining quality of the physical products you find on (U.S.) Amazon. It really helped crystallize for me in my own mind what's been happening there. He can't find a decent electrical butt joint to, well, as you see from his demonstration, potentially save his life (versus the Chinese crap e.g. starting a fire that takes it).

  This move is just one more step -- far down the road -- towards Amazon becoming an outright sewer.

  I'm supposed to pay $130 ($150?...) a year, for THIS?!

  (And by the way, 2 day delivery is a farce now. A few things are quicker, and many are... the opposite.)

  Anyway, I'm looking at a set of "Magnum PI" DVD's I just picked up used, because Freevee has had the streaming rights bound up for the last year or a bit more, and I literally cannot watch the show together with their ads. I'll take the downgrade in image quality over putting up with them.

  Oh, and if you want Magnum on Blu-ray? You have to pony up the better part of $200 for one of the remaining European box sets. Then purchase a "gray" modded Blu-ray player. Or rip them. Or... that other thing.

  F--- the entire "entertainment industry". Once it transitions from creativity to the intellectual property portion of its function, it's just a monster.

  P.S. Although I don't regularly survey all the offerings, the only ad-based streaming whose ad delivery I've been able to tolerate is Tubi. They've been increasing the quantity of ads -- sigh -- but you still get a 10 second warning, and the ads I see largely I do not find comparatively offensive. (And those shite/exploitative online gambling ads seem to be in decline -- yay!)

  Plus, Tubi overall has a comparable if not better catalog, these days.

  So maybe I'll just tell Amazon to stuff it. If I'm going to have ads, Tubi does that better, anyway. (Although I do hate making Fox, now its owner, any money, even such indirect, advertising-based money.)

• by PeterStuer on 12/27/23, 8:17 PM

  Prime Video has near 0 value in Europe, because they have almost no content. The only reason it 'lives' imho is that it is bundled with Prime delivery.

  I have noticed that I no longer order much from Amazon because of the rampant fake product problem that arised from SKU pooling.

  I just went to my account settings and turned on the 'warn me 3 days before renewing'. If they go true with these adds over here, it will be the straw that broke the camel's back for me. And to be fair, unless I see some huge video catalog improvement on some change in SKU pooling so I can trust buying again, they loose my sub anyways.

• by bilalq on 12/27/23, 5:52 AM

  With these quality degradations from streaming providers and content removal of "purchased" items due to licensing changes, I feel like we're going to see piracy make a comeback.

  I wish there was an easy way to digitize large libraries of physical media. Doing it manually is way too much of a chore to bother.

• by dboreham on 12/26/23, 11:52 PM

  Hopefully they don't make the dogs breakfast that is Hulu -- there you can have a subscription "without ads" but then they show you adds on some content. There's no logic to determine which content gets ads and which doesn't, nor can you tell if you would be just as well off not subscribing to the no-ads level since you can't tell how many (if any) additional adds that would generate.

• by shartshooter on 12/27/23, 6:00 AM

  Unfortunately, too many people in America are just indifferent to sacrificing their attention to ads.

  I see it in my parents/siblings when I visit. An ad that would have me immediately grasping a remote, doesn't even make them budget. They watch it, consider it, and move on.

  All these companies have figured out that they can boil the frog and not enough people make enough of a stink for them to care. So they'll keep cramming ads down everyone's throats, because they've got a monopoly on the content.

• by bestes on 12/26/23, 11:25 PM

  Cancelled. I subscribe through Apple and I don’t even see the ad-free option. Might reconsider if it appears, but ads are a deal-breaker for me.

• by elzbardico on 12/27/23, 1:43 AM

  Cable TV once had the same allure: Freedom from ads. It was even hard to explain kids 10 years ago, at a time when kids still watched cable, that there was once a time when cable TV didn't have ads.

• by irajdeep on 12/27/23, 1:23 AM

  In the end, we all just re-invented good old TV!

• by pierat on 12/27/23, 12:27 AM

  Nah, piracy is cheaper and better.

  I can download whatever I want, in a world wide scope, for free, with no DRM shit. And no ads or other onerous garbage bolted on.

  And I keep what I download, rather than "stream" (download every time, with no ability to save).

  So this 'pay more for less'? Nah, y'all pushing me to piracy. And I have NO problems doing it. And no, I'm not going to pay $150/no for streaming crap that I end up with nothing when I cancel.

  So, yeah. I pirate.

• by nmridul on 12/27/23, 3:59 AM

  Amazon needs something sticky included in prime. An email or very generous photo storage. This is what keeps many people stuck with Gmail and outlook. Else amazon is soon going to see huge drop in prime subscribers.

  From the comments here, looks like fast shipping and streaming are not sticky enough for most people.

• by andy99 on 12/26/23, 10:13 PM

  Amazon prime became worthless to me around 2018. I'm surprised anyone still gets value out of it. For those that do, maybe this isn't a big deal. I care much more about how bad and confusing their selection is, dodgy marketplace sellers, and almost everything cheap being not eligible for prime than I do about this.

  Amazon of the "prime" example of a new-er tech company that bought their way into a monopoly and they used it to gouge people while providing bad service. Uber being the other obvious one.

• by dissident_coder on 12/27/23, 1:38 AM

  Recently started trialing Walmart Delivery Pass to get next day delivery from local stores. Actually pretty convenient to get my fresh produce, meat, dairy, etc… delivered along with whatever stuff I’d normally order from Amazon with Prime.

  I was planning on keeping prime for video but the free shipping is less valuable to me now, but if they’re gonna make the service worse and charge me more for what I had before then I’m just gonna cancel.

• by diegs on 12/27/23, 5:02 AM

  I wish I could pay money to hide amazon ads on our echo show devices and not auto-opt-in to each new "experience" pane they add. They let you do it for Kindle ads and now for Prime, maybe it'd be a nice cash injection for the faltering Alexa org?

  Really, I just want our smart displays (which I paid real money for) to show our family photos and do smart home things. It's exhausting to repeatedly have to open up the settings panel and uncheck whichever new screens/"experiences" they've added each time they start popping up. There are dozens at this point--talk about shipping your org chart!

  Hopefully Matter will mature at some point and Apple will ship some smart displays of their own, and then we can toss our Alexas in the bin.

• by keikobadthebad on 12/26/23, 10:47 PM

  I got Dark Patterned into prime a few years ago. I was a low volume purchaser anyway and only used prime video for a handful of shows, I never used the music service since access to it was just another flagrant lock-in. I left Prime in Aug.

  I was surprised with the things I bought since then, despite the quoted delivery being wose, they all actually arrived next day anyway. And I did not miss prime video at all.

  Since I'm not paying to make my eyeballs available you're not even going to make the ad money off me. The ads are just punishing the people still giving them money for prime.

• by MCUmaster on 12/26/23, 11:44 PM

  Maybe it’s because I use OpenBSD, or something, but I’ve never once gotten Prime Video to work. Every year or so I try it, it doesn’t work, then I remember most shows and movies are garbage and forget streaming video even exists for another year.

• by kelnos on 12/27/23, 6:58 AM

  I've more or less given up on the streaming services again. It's a shame, because in the early era of streaming it was actually great: affordable prices, decent quality, good app experience (Netflix at least), and low fragmentation.

  But nowadays if I want to watch everything I care to watch, I have to subscribe to at least five different services, and the pricing keeps going up, sometimes multiple times per year. They're trying to wring more and more money out of us with more payment tiers, and I refuse to watch ads, so I'll always be paying mire for the ad-free tier. UX has suffered, and apps are buggy and don't work right at the most frustrating times.

  Fortunately I rarely use Prime Video for anything; I mainly subscribe to Prime for the free quick shipping. I've had it more or less since they first introduced it, and get value out of it just for the shipping.

  Overall I guess I'm fairly disillusioned with Amazon, especially with their product counterfeiting issues, so there are certain classes of things I'll never buy there. And I'm of course uncomfortable with how they treat their warehouse workers and delivery drivers.

• by Animats on 12/27/23, 2:12 AM

  I'm glad I never bought Prime.

  Almost everything on Amazon has free shipping. You have to fight through dark patterns four times to get to it, but it's there. Free shipping doesn't take much longer than regular shipping, anyway.

  I've been using Amazon less since they sent me counterfeit vitamins. I'll usually order stuff from wherever the drop-shipper gets it from.

• by isaacremuant on 12/27/23, 2:25 AM

  I'm never using a service with ads. Ever.

  If I pay for it, it shouldn't have ads.

  I have prime but not for prime video because I practically never use it.

  This means I'll use it less and I'll consider the value of the prime offering worse than before.

• by jdeibele on 12/27/23, 12:34 AM

  We have an Amazon-branded Chase card that gets 2% back on Amazon purchases if you're not a Prime member. There's no annual fee for the card.

  If you are a Prime member, it's 5% back. $139 is the annual fee for Prime. $139/3% difference = $4633.33

  Somewhat to my surprise, we spent about $3700 on Amazon this past year, meaning $139-$111 or Amazon Prime cost us $28.

• by BeefDinnerPurge on 12/29/23, 5:04 PM

  Mid-show ads is more than enough to cancel Prime. Mid-video ads on youtube made me all but stop watching it on mobile. But I'll probably wade my way through S4 of The Boys and S2 of Invincible before doing so since they're both coming up in the near future. But this 100% explains the 2/4 premiere date for the last of Invincible episodes.

  Same day and overnight delivery are something I never needed or wanted. 2-day delivery was nice, but now it's random. Amazon prices are no longer all but guaranteed to be competitive and buying directly from the manufacturer is often the same or lower price. Prime(sic) goeth before the fall I guess.

• by Havoc on 12/27/23, 12:36 AM

  Prime video is garbage anyway. They’ve already stuffed it full of ads and the UX experience is cratering.

  Useful things that made it tolerable “free to me” were removed to facilitate ramming the buy & rent stuff down your throat and series seem to get phased out even faster than Netflix which is a feat.

• by Rapzid on 12/26/23, 11:39 PM

  I hate how even if you pay for no ads shows can have ackward cuts designed around commercial breaks :|

• by nextworddev on 12/27/23, 3:13 AM

  Shrinkflation, shitflation will be the mega trend for the next 5 years, started from 2020

• by agnosticmantis on 12/27/23, 4:11 AM

  My mind was blown recently discovering Tubi with so many great movies (many of them classics and highly rated) for free (with occasional ads, of course) and I regret having paid for Netflix and other services in the past.

• by replwoacause on 12/27/23, 2:57 AM

  Happy to quit this just like I did Netflix

• by sys_64738 on 12/27/23, 12:57 AM

  I thought we already paid for Amazon Prime Video via our Amazon Prime memberships?

• by heads on 12/27/23, 12:16 AM

  How comparable is $3 a month to the ad revenue they might make from the shows?

  Apparently Amazon Prime accounts get a median of 300 minutes per week of view time. That’s 20 hours of TV a month with (in the order of) a few hundred ad slots I am paying to not have to watch. Amazon are making a penny per unwatched-ad from me.

  Contrast with broadcast TV: Good Morning Britain wants £4k for an ad slot in a show that has 500k to 800k viewers so that’s a CPM also in the order of a penny [edit: ahem, £5, not a penny] paid for by the advertiser, for 1000x views.

  So, even taking into account Amazon’s targeted ads vs broadcast TV ads, they can indeed make a lot more money from withholding ads than if they show them?

  We could call their bluff. Maybe they don’t have any ads to actually show for which advertisers are willing to pay significant fee. But if the business model is to get consumers to pay Amazon to make the pain go away then they’d probably just show 90 seconds of screaming at the start, middle and end of every episode of The Boys.

• by gpderetta on 12/27/23, 12:08 AM

  Sub-prime video.

  Well I guess I'll be saving ~70£ a year once it gets rolled out in UK.

• by more_corn on 12/27/23, 1:47 AM

  I quit prime over a year ago and I don’t miss it. Walmart shipping is actually faster in my area.

  I highly encourage every single person to drop prime. Adding advertising to streaming will undo all of the gains we’ve made by shifting to streaming.

  If one platform does it and everyone quits nobody else will. If everyone stays every other platform will follow suit.

• by jpalawaga on 12/26/23, 11:40 PM

  Being back in Canada over the holidays, I was shocked to see how much better their streaming catalogues are.

  I remember historically, some countries have had much better catalogs than others. Incidentally, I think the catalog quality is proportional to the amount of piracy. more lucrative markets have worse catalogues, despite making more money.

• by pedalpete on 12/27/23, 12:25 AM

  I just recently signed up for their free trial because I wanted to watch Air, and figured over the holidays, maybe I'd watch something else (I'm not a TV/Movie person).

  Air was great! I haven't seen a single other thing I'd want to watch. Started a few things, but nothing grabbed my interest.

  I know most people don't try life without TV, and I used to LOVE TV and movies. But honestly, give yourself a month without, and you just may find that you are filling your time with more interesting things.

  I actually still wish I had more things to do, but just as a few, pick up an instrument (I play guitar), try art (I paint, would like to sculpt), write, read, exercise, make new friends. Even try spending more time cooking, or meditating.

  I almost think that staring at a blank wall with your own thoughts can be better than most of what is on TV.

  Also, remove the physical TV, and layout your house around socializing rather than watching.

• by FredPret on 12/26/23, 11:51 PM

  I've been buying movies / seasons on Apple TV.

  No ads and I "own" it. I read somewhere that if Apple cut me off, they'd have to refund all those purchases.

  But even better is buying a DVD set and ripping it. What a pain, but at least you never have to make a deal with this particular devil.

• by cdbyr on 12/27/23, 1:53 AM

  This seems like short-run thinking winning. I don’t want to have to think about if companies I interact with are going to slowly diminish the product. This sort of thing undermines that - it’s a rare good thing for companies to be trustable, and a bummer when it doesn’t hold.

• by jerpint on 12/27/23, 5:03 AM

  Yesterday I wanted to watch a show, which was available on prime. When trying to view it, I had to pay an extra 5.99$ for another subscription to watch, which I paid. I then got served adds every 10 minutes during my show. Streaming services are broken

• by etempleton on 12/27/23, 5:36 AM

  I used to love Amazon as a service, despite their monopolistic practices, but I find myself avoiding using Amazon more and more because of the slow erosion of service quality over the last few years. I can handle the price increase of Prime, but I no longer feel I get the same quality service. A few things I have noticed:

  1. I see less 1 day shipping on items than a few years ago.

  2. My subscribe and save items are over priced and usually out of stock

  3.Twitch has a lot of ads

  4.Amazon Prime will now have ads

  5. Brand safety - too many scam sellers or low priced untested junk sellers on Amazon. Apparel is particularly bad. A lot of knock offs.

• by spike021 on 12/27/23, 2:15 AM

  Between this and many of my Prime "two-day" eligible orders taking up to and occasionally longer than a week these days, I'm thinking it may be time to cancel my Prime subscription.

• by insane_dreamer on 12/27/23, 4:39 AM

  I am altering the deal; pray I do not alter it any further. - Lord Bezos

• by bamboozled on 12/27/23, 3:21 AM

  Cool, so we’re back to commercial television , what’s next programming ?

• by dingi on 12/27/23, 7:34 AM

  Well, you can always turn to good ol' piracy. Nobody has to pay for dozen or so streaming services ever. And now you want to shove ads down the throat too. No thanks. reply

• by bonestamp2 on 12/27/23, 6:20 AM

  I wish I could get a discount on prime if I removed prime video.

• by epgui on 12/27/23, 2:20 AM

  The day this starts is the day I stop using the service.

• by andsoitis on 12/27/23, 1:59 AM

  This is really just a price increase, given the increasing costs of TV and movie productions (creatives must get paid).

  Details:

  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.

• by cs702 on 12/27/23, 12:08 AM

  Now that subscriber growth has slown down at most streaming services, the end of the "golden age of TV" is at hand.

  Welcome to the "bean-counting age of TV," in which streaming services try to milk subscribers for as much as possible without pissing them off too much.

  Going forward, I'm expecting cheaper content, greater restrictions, higher prices, a proliferation of tiered subscription plans, and pervasive advertisement.

  Completely predictable, and yet also very disappointing.

• by matheusmoreira on 12/27/23, 1:28 AM

  Never fails. They just can't resist, can they?

  Never listen to anyone who tells you some service will never have ads just because you pay for it.

• by getlawgdon on 12/28/23, 9:47 AM

  This is pure greed. I got their email notice about this. I tried to complain, but there was nobody to reach, no impact I could make. It's just one massive, deaf monolith. I realize more than ever that this consumer isolationism is crazy and I certainly dont need to fund it! Cancelling Prime today.

• by pshirshov on 12/27/23, 10:47 AM

  Well, Netflix increased the subscription price, I dropped it. If I need something on a rare occasion, I can always "buy" their content on torrents.

  Regrading Prime - I will continue paying for the premium delivery as long as it lasts, though I would prefer to watch Prime Video ad-free on torrents.

  98% of the content is crap anyways.

• by lulznews on 12/27/23, 3:41 AM

  Nice customer obsession.

• by ChicagoDave on 12/27/23, 5:56 AM

  I had thought to just keep paying, but the value isn’t there anymore. Last mile delivery is ubiquitous. I don’t use any of the other “benefits”. I’ve purchased shows and movies, but mostly don’t care. We’ve seen everything anyway.

  I’m down to Hulu+Disney, Max (via AT&T), and AppleTV+. Everything else is cancelled.

• by suyash on 12/27/23, 1:39 AM

  Easy solution - can someone create or add to the existing ad blocker to work on Amazon Prime ads as well please?

• by mistyvales on 12/27/23, 2:08 AM

  So does the $139 yearly package deal INCLUDE ads for Prime content (movies/shows) or will that be ad-free?

• by kitsune_ on 12/27/23, 1:36 AM

  I'm paying for YouTube Premium and I fully expect them to do the same thing once they've squeezed the lemon dry and need to find more money in this perverse game of rentier capitalism.

• by amir734jj on 12/27/23, 10:37 PM

  Prime is already expensive. The only show I watch on Prime is Invincible because I love the comic book. We have to show these companies that it's not right to include ads if you pay $140/year. I will be canceling my Prime. I am very disappointed.

• by preommr on 12/27/23, 2:20 AM

  How else are they supposed to fund projects like "The rings of power" for a billion dollars?

• by eur0pa on 12/27/23, 7:27 AM

  Piracy is alive and well, has been since the late 90s and early 00s. Never seen an ad in my life.

• by dbg31415 on 12/27/23, 6:28 AM

  I will continue to pay for Prime and Netflix and Disney but I will also just continue to pirate all the content I want and not watch it through the services. They are all getting so junky lately. The quality of content across the board has gone way down.

• by bryanmgreen on 12/27/23, 1:54 AM

  How did paid channels like HBO and Showtime make their ad-free model work in the regular TV era?

• by AlchemistCamp on 12/27/23, 6:33 AM

  Since Amazon Prime Video got serious about region locking and eliminated essentially everything except videos they produced, I pretty much gave up on the service anyway.

  Amazon use to be a legitimate competitor, but now, Netflix is a more obvious choice than ever.

• by fsckboy on 12/27/23, 6:28 AM

  >Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements.

  people, it's 3 bucks a month extra to get rid of ads.

  I hate Amazon for many reasons, but the $3 is not going to be the deal breaker

• by aydyn on 12/27/23, 1:15 AM

  ??? They already all show ads

• by rompledorph on 12/27/23, 5:48 AM

  “We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you,…”

  Sounds like there will be targeted ads tailored for the viewer

• by HumblyTossed on 12/27/23, 12:02 AM

  We still have Netflix and we also have Amazon. We’ve cut back on watching stuff so we’re probably dropping those this year.

  It’s not worth keeping anything for as little as we watch now.

• by bamboozled on 12/27/23, 3:21 AM

  Cool, so we’re back to commercial television , what’s next programming? I mean I’m sure there is more money in it. Sponsored content etc.

• by DarkByte on 12/27/23, 2:33 AM

  I will be unsubscribing once this is live.

• by sailfast on 12/27/23, 3:18 AM

  I would be angry about this but there isn’t very much on Prime anyway.

  That said, I can’t say I’ll ever buy their hardware again.

• by stjohnswarts on 12/27/23, 7:00 AM

  they've been introducing it in some things over time. I think this may be my exit call. I've been using it less over time, I usually order enough to get the free shipping, etc, so ditching prime might be the best option as hint, if enough people do it.

• by instagib on 12/27/23, 10:07 PM

  Will paying the fee also remove the pre-roll advertisements that are already in place?

• by interestica on 12/27/23, 3:40 AM

  Amazon always seemed uniquely positioned to do product-placement type ads for any show. They have demonstrated the basics with their “x-ray” overlays for shows and it’s not a big leap for them to use it as gateway for the online store. It currently displays information on actors in the specific scenes on screen.

  Link to albums featured in the scene? Fashion? Small appliances shown in the protagonist’s kitchen?

  (To be clear, I hate this. But it seems inevitable)

• by mwambua on 12/27/23, 5:18 AM

  Will this affect shows/movies that have been purchased on Amazon?

• by apapapa on 12/27/23, 2:32 PM

  Https://sunxdcc.com

  Unlike torrent, you dont even need a VPN for downloads

• by ShadowBanThis01 on 12/27/23, 4:15 AM

  I hope this backfires as did Google's crackdown on YouTube ad-blockers.

  I already have a VPN and BitTorrent trackers I can rely on. I'm willing to (and do) pay for content. But I will not pay to watch ads. Amazon are scumbags who steal from small enterprises anyway; I almost welcome this motivation to deny them more of my money.

• by emrah on 12/27/23, 9:09 AM

  Many titles I end up watching are on Freevee anyway

• by okr on 12/28/23, 11:20 PM

  What must i hear, a whiney sound from so called "hackers", who make thousands of dollars each month, let prime run for years, and now, when adding a few extra dollars to continue to have free shipping and ads free video seems like necessity, well, now they are upset! Ridiculous.

  And sipping their next Latte for 10 bucks on their way to work. :)) Oh wait, going to work, thats is now out of the question and very unsettling too.

• by jrs235 on 12/26/23, 11:51 PM

  Per their email:

  An update on Prime Video

  Dear Prime member,

  We are writing to you today about an upcoming change to your Prime Video experience. Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. 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. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* that you can sign up for here.

  Prime is a very compelling value. Prime members enjoy a wide range of shopping, savings, and entertainment benefits, including:

  More than 300 million items are available with free Prime shipping and tens of millions of the most popular items are available with free Same-Day or One-Day Delivery. Access to exclusive and broad streaming video content (including Prime Video exclusives like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Boys, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Citadel, The Wheel of Time, Reacher, and The Summer I Turned Pretty, as well as blockbuster movies such as Air, Creed III, Dungeons & Dragons, Candy Cane Lane with Eddie Murphy, and exclusive live sports including NFL Thursday Night Football). Access to Prime Video Channels, which provides an unmatched selection of subscription channels like Max, Paramount+ with SHOWTIME, BET+, MGM+, ViX+, Crunchyroll, PBS KIDS, NBA League Pass, MLB.TV, and STARZ—with no extra apps to download, and no cable required. Customers only pay for the ones they want, and can cancel anytime. The ability to use your Prime shopping benefits—like fast, free delivery, a seamless checkout experience, 24/7 live chat support, and hassle-free returns—on online stores beyond Amazon.com with Buy with Prime. Exclusive deals and shopping events like Prime Day. Ad-free listening of 100 million songs and millions of podcast episodes with Amazon Music. Prescription medications as low as $1 per month and fast, free shipping from Amazon Pharmacy. Access to unlimited eligible generic prescription medications for only $5 per month (including free shipping) with RxPass from Amazon Pharmacy. High-quality health care from One Medical for only $9 per month (or $99 annually), with the option to add up to five additional memberships for the family for only $6 per month (or $66 annually) each. Free two-hour Fresh grocery delivery on orders over $100 (and delivery charges between $6.95 to $9.95 for orders less than $100), and in-store savings on select groceries at Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market stores across the U.S. Unlimited photo storage with Amazon Photos. Gaming benefits with Prime Gaming. More than 3,000 books and magazines with Prime Reading. A free, one-year Grubhub+ membership trial valued at $120 per year, offering unlimited $0 delivery fees on orders over $12.

  And, you can expect additional features and programs added in the future for our Prime members.

  As mentioned above, no action is required from you. If you wish to sign up for the ad-free option, you can click here. And, as always, if you have questions about your Prime membership, you can manage your account here.

  Thank you for being a valued member of Amazon Prime.

  Sincerely, The Amazon Prime team

• by SubiculumCode on 12/27/23, 7:07 AM

  cable used to not have ads. dropping prime mow.

• by mynameisnoone on 12/27/23, 3:18 AM

  No big loss. There's been nothing original and good on PV for 2 years. It's basically Amazon's streaming nearly content-free shovelware service and overpriced Blockbuster with zero investment. Sorry, but I refuse to watch shit without ads, or now with it.

• by nothercastle on 12/27/23, 2:33 AM

  I guess I need to finish expanse season 3 at least. Nothing else really worth watching on it anyway. Meh to power rings, and NFL Thursday is over anyway by Jan. What else do they have? The boys?

• by more_corn on 12/27/23, 2:05 AM

  How about nope?

• by binkHN on 12/27/23, 1:52 AM

  I think this qualifies for the enshittification of everything.

• by nyjah on 12/26/23, 11:29 PM

  This is such a bummer. Why does everything get worse? I actually really enjoy prime for movies and specifically for foreign movies.

  I can’t stand all the freevee crap they have been forcing down our throats too. They pack a record amount of commercials into those movies and it’s all clunky when you pause and go back, or need to fast forward or rewind. Just wish there was better ways to get rid of the freevee crap, but if 2.99 gets rid of those ads too, I might be inclined to upgrade. I know it wil just be the stuff that has no ads now tho.

• by NickC25 on 12/26/23, 10:41 PM

  Dumb. You pay for Prime. You pay extra for Prime Video. You now pay even more extra for Prime Video to not show you ads.

  This is a company worth $1.5 trillion dollars (with a founder worth $175 billion dollars)....yet they can't help themselves but triple-dip? Yeah, no.

  Arr, matey, I hear the high seas calling.

• by 0cf8612b2e1e on 12/26/23, 11:44 PM

  As a bystander, could someone tell me how many of these video platforms get basic usability wrong? Do the programmers not eat their own dog food?

  If I watch show X to the end, a little prompt will display saying, "Start Next Episode", I then close the viewer. Next day when I click resume series, it will bring me back to the episode that is 99% complete so that I can watch the credits roll. Why is the algorithm to detect end of show so poor? They have already identified I could advance to the next episode.

  Even better is when I want to re-watch a previously seen episode, and it will return me to the end of the show where I last stopped. I think it is HBO(?) who lacks a "Restart from Beginning" option, forcing you to manually rewind.

  Or that some platforms do not maintain a, "Continue Watching" video bar in the same consistent location, forcing you to bounce around to locate your show. This one at least seems like an obvious dark pattern to remind you there is other content, so I can at least attribute some thoughtful design to that annoyance.

• by figassis on 12/26/23, 10:10 PM

  I feel piracy today is pretty morally excused.

• by oidar on 12/27/23, 1:28 AM

  Fantastic. I can't wait to have advertisements for cheap knockoffs on my Amazon Primes shows and my Alexa devices./s

• by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on 12/27/23, 1:17 AM

  > No action is required from you

  Thank goodness! I couldn't opt-into seeing ads fast enough! /s

• by qainsights on 12/26/23, 10:04 PM

  Starting from January 29, 2024, Amazon Prime Video will begin showing ads alongside content unless customers pay an additional fee of $2.99 per month. This change is aimed at allowing Amazon to continue investing in compelling content and increasing its investment over a long period of time. Customers can avoid ads by paying the additional fee on top of their monthly or yearly Amazon Prime subscription.