If you’ve watched Amazon Prime Video content in the last couple months, you have found your show or movie interrupted multiple times with commercial breaks, despite you not changing anything about your subscription.
This is part of a move by Amazon to suddenly insert ads into the current tier of Amazon Prime Video that everyone had previously, and now subscribers are being asked to pay an extra monthly fee on top of what they had previously paid to delete them.
This is essentially the opposite of what every other streaming service that has or has introduced ads has done. Almost all of those services either offered an ad-supported tier from the start (which is sometimes free), or if they introduced ads later, it was pitched as a lower cost option you had to opt-in to. Here, Amazon is instead just throwing ads in everyone’s existing subscriptions and forcing them to pay more to avoid them.
That fee is not nothing, either. It’s $3 a month to get rid of the ads that previously did not exist. That’s $36 a year added onto a $140 a year Amazon Prime subscription. That’s a 25% increase to the cost of Amazon Prime just to get rid of these ads, which is after Amazon Prime itself already increased its price by $20 in 2022.
This whole thing is beyond irritating, and you’re reminded of it every time you watch something on Amazon now, but never quite annoyed enough to actually spend $36 a year. I’m essentially not doing it out of spite at this point. What’s also obnoxious is that the majority of the ads I see are for other Amazon Prime Video shows, meaning Amazon isn’t even earning actual ad revenue here. This was the case with the three ad breaks I had during this week’s episode of Invincible, where a very emotional moment was interrupted by an ad midway through the episode.
That’s another issue, where streaming shows were developed without the kind of pacing that makes for easy places to insert commercials, unlike broadcast TV. So you are inserting commercials totally randomly, sometimes mid-sentence, for all these series now.
Somehow this entire thing feels worse than a normal price increase would. There is actually a class action lawsuit going on against Amazon based on the fact that people paid one price for what they thought was ad free programming, which is suddenly not ad free. But best case, that covers just the last year of purchase, and I doubt anything meaningful will come of that. Worst case scenario for Amazon is they just do a normal price increase and make the ads an optional lower tier like other places.
This feels like nickel and diming from Amazon, a trillion-dollar company raking in upwards of $40 billion a year from Prime already. But it’s also the way that this has been implemented that makes it extra obnoxious and inexcusable.
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