As we reported last year, Amazon will be placing ads in Prime Video for paying subscribers this year – and those ads will start later this month, on January 29. If you want to keep your ad-free viewing, you'll have to pay extra for it: $2.99 per month in the US and £2.99 per month in the UK. The ad-free option includes everything except live sports, which will continue to include ads.
The Amazon email sent to subscribers last night, and the previous one blog post tries to portray this as a good thing: the ads come to make your TV experience better! The introduction of advertising “will allow us to continue to invest in engaging content and increase that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have significantly fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers.”
But of course, it's not about improving your experience, any more than filling your Amazon search results with products from the Shenzen Dangerous Toy and Lawn Mower Company is about making Amazon more useful: Like other streaming services, Amazon finds that streaming is more costs and delivers less than hoped. So this is a one-two punch of increasing revenue: Amazon either gets more money by putting ads in your shows, or by persuading you to pay to get rid of them.
What Amazon Ads Mean for You
That really depends on the show. For shows made for what streamers always told us were the bad old days of ad-supported TV, it won't be much of a trial: those shows were made with ads in mind, so they have breaks where the ads should have gone without interrupting the power. But for shows created without ads in mind, the experience will likely be the same as that of FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV) channels like Amazon's Freevee, where ads randomly interrupt key scenes with no respect for continuity.
What we see here is part of a bigger picture that also applies to music streaming: what starts out as disruptive, with tech companies promising to lower costs and increase the ease of access to media, eventually starts to look like the things it was intended. unlike – like broadcast television with its advertisements, or cable with its expensive subscriptions.
Amazon isn't the only streamer facing fierce competition and rising costs as the era of effectively free lending has ended, but it is unique in the way it combines Prime Video with its broader Prime service: if you decide If you want to cancel the ads, that means you'll also have to cancel your other Prime benefits, like Faster Free Delivery, Amazon Photos and so on. That makes Prime Video stickier than Netflix, which you can simply cancel without having to wait longer for your pet food and gadgets to be delivered.