I’m pretty laid back and try not to get my feathers ruffled easily, but this has my feathers in disarray. Amazon Prime is adding ads to its streaming service. The only way to avoid them is to pay an additional $2.99/month. I’m already paying for the service, so I should not have to deal with ads—I can watch ads with standard TV programming.
I will give myself time to cool down before deciding, but I’m seriously considering canceling my Prime subscription. I’m tired of being nickeled and dimed to death.
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.
If I cancel, Amazon no longer gets my annual subscription, I’m likely to purchase less from Amazon, and they certainly wont get an additional $3/month from me.
This should put a dent in Jeff Bezos‘s yacht budget!
It’s not even the money it’s the principal. I wouldn’t have flinched at Prime going up 2 dollars to cover costs but what I want to is pre-pay for a service and then pay to get out of ads.
I swear Amazon and Google are drinking advertising seawater. The more they consume the deeper the thirst.
I joined Amazon Prime back when it only got you the free shipping. Much less expensive then, $79/yr. Now it will be $96/year more than that, or $8/month for video. If you are only in it for the video, it will be $175/year or $14.60/month. Seems reasonable to me especially compared to other streaming services these days.
EDITED: I realized that Amazon Prime Video is available separately from Amazon Prime. It’s currently $9/month and will be going up to $12
I’m with you in my heart, but it’s also worth stepping back and looking. Everything is going up in price at the moment.
If the total price is worth it to you, then it’s worth just paying.
Personally, what put me off Prime was that when I subscribed (free trial), I didn’t see a way to only show what I could watch for free. The nickel-and-diming my wife got fed up with was that she would be scrolling through to find something that looked interesting, then check if she had to pay for it. So, we cancelled and gave up only about 4 days into the trial.
That was around a year ago I think, and we’re not that interested in looking again.
I have Amazon Prime, which includes video, but I dislike paying for streaming video and then being forced to pay more to not have ads. Ads have historically supported “free” programming. Watching ads is a fair “price” to pay for “free” programming. What I find distasteful is paying for programming and then additional for ad free programming. It feels like “double-dipping.”
I’m canceling as soon as I see the first ad on Jan 29. It will be interesting to see if they react to a 17 year prime member leaving (they won’t). AFAIK my prime benefits will continue until my original renewal date.
I can order many items from Walmart and BestBuy, etc. and get curbside delivery. By the time my prime subscription ends I may decide I should have quit years ago.
Until a year or so ago there was a “Free for me” filter than you could check (each time you used the service) that hid all the $ movies. But it was buried in the app and I just happened to find it one day.
AFAIK the ‘free with ads’ movies from prime will still be available via the Freevee app.
Well, “welcome to the real world.” Consider cable TV, movie theaters, sports arenas and other venues with admission fees, YouTube (where you can pay for no ads but still get the Youtuber’s advertisements), and an ever-increasing number of streaming services that have ad/no-ad pricing besides Amazon.
Meh, I never watch their garbage anyway. its about the same level as AppleTV… I pay Prime for the shipping and music for my Echos. They can keep their ridiculous tv “entertainment”.
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.” Cory Doctorow
An alternative way to think about it is they are keeping the price low(er) for people who can’t afford more increases in price by introducing adverts, but they allow you to opt out of that if you can afford it by paying the extra to remove them.
I will be cancelling, also because of the principle. I was never entirely comfortable with my subscription anyway (because Amazon), but I’d justified it on the grounds that next day delivery was sometimes convenient for my family (I’m an old customer, so I’ve always considered the streaming element secondary to the postal element). Realistically we already avoid Amazon for purchases if possible, the search function and quality of items has declined in the last decade, and we rarely watch content, but I’m not paying for a service that then runs ads. It’s American capitalist nonsense and I don’t want any part of it Since we use their services so little it’s probably cheaper to just pay shipping when needed anyway.
(The sooner someone in the world starts properly regulating the use of digital advertising in public spaces / commons, the better.)
That’s a fair point and an excellent reminder not always to interpret things through the prism of self. That said, I’ll probably cancel Prime. We seldom watch Prime entertainment; except for Christmas gifts, we don’t purchase a lot. I suspect I can get most of what I need delivered through Walmart, Best Buy, and other local retailers. That said, it is difficult to beat Amazon’s massive selection of merchandise.
On the other side of the spectrum, I probably order too much from Amazon to cancel my prime membership, even though the value obviously drops the more they raise the price.
I join the unhappiness over the price hikes on the basic prime membership followed by the reduction in service. It seems that this is the way of the world now, with everyone doing the same thing. Yes, Netflix has created a “lower price” tier with ads, but that price is what a used to pay for a no-ad service, with my monthly cost having gone up for the lowest level of ad-free.
I am looking at what I can cut back. My Disney+ subscription will not be renewing (just not enough content that I want to watch for the recent price hike to justify, even if it means missing Thor XII). Netflix may be next. Even YouTubeTV might have to go in favor of a broadcast antenna - going old school!
When I signed up for Prime it was $79. And in 2011 Amazon added Prime Video
Then they added a bunch of features I’ll never use and raised the price to $99 in 2014
Then they raised it to $119 in 2018, and to $139 in 2022. And now they want just $2.99 more.
Most things, and people, have a limit.
I’ll still purchase stuff from Amazon occasionally. But Prime Video is now just another streaming service, like Netflix and AppleTV+, that I will subscribe to from time to time when they have something I want to see.
I’ve started recording many shows I want to watch through my cable service. This allows me to fast-forward through the ads. I mainly watch sports and older shows that are not filled with the “F” word constantly (have show writers forgotten how to write without using the “F” word every other sentence, or do they write the way they talk? If so, that is a sad commentary). I’d already canceled Netflix, and I have never subscribed to YouTube. I may cancel Prime, leaving me with Apple TV+, Disney, and Hulu. The truth is that “TV” has become a vast, shallow, and often vulgar wasteland. I’ve always been a heavy reader, but I think I’ll read even more, listen to more music, and enjoy my baseball, NFL, and college football. Perhaps Amazon did me a favor by raising its prices.
Since we use their services so little it’s probably cheaper to just pay shipping when needed anyway.
