Amazon to introduce ads on Prime Video in 2024

Even as a child, when we had cable, I would ask my dad why we still had to watch commercials even though we pay for the service. I understood why stations like CBS, NBC, or ABC may have needed ads as they were free over-the-air, but surely paying for cable should mean no ads, right?
Never had a good answer. It's pretty fucked up that we collectively allowed them to pull that shit on us and put up with it for like 3 decades.
- There was a brief and glorious time when Pay Cable was billed as being ad-free. You would still see promos for other shows and channels between shows, but there were no commercial breaks!

🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

yo ho, a pirates life for me

Would help if they still made content worth pirating.
- I liked The Boys and Tales From The Loop. Couldn't tell you anything else they made though
- fair point.
  The Boys was good, but the Lord of the Rings series was horrible.
- Kind of glad Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ended when it did, so I don't need to see ads!

How do people think paying for a service and still being served ads is acceptable?

Hulu has a lower price tear that includes ads. It makes it more affordable for some people. If they had started out with ads I would be less upset, but for a big company like Amazon it just seems like they're trying to make even more money off of the consumer.
- Hulu DID start out with ads. When they launched it was an entirely ad supported service. Hulu+ didn't come until years later. After several years of running two tiers of service, free ad supported and paid ad free, they dropped the free tier. Now, years later, we're back to ads with Hulu, but this time you pay for the privilege.
People lived with it for years with cable.
- Cable started out without ads too. That was why you paid for it.
- Right, but the business model is totally different. You're paying your cable provider for access, you're not paying to watch the TV shows. The TV shows were financed by broadcaster advertising revenues among other streams of income. With Amazon, you're paying for access and to fund their programs. Ads are just greedy and anti-consumer for a vertically integrated platform like Amazon Video.
- Cable wasn't really a thing here in the UK, we're not primed for their bullshit.
To be fair, Prime Video has always just been a free perk attached to prime (and with all the other 'perks' combined you could basically consider it free). For example I get an extra 3% back on all my Amazon orders by being a prime member. At the current cost of prime and just with the home supplies I order w/ subscribe and save, it pays for itself. That's not to say I'm happy with this, but in actuality they're fairly well positioned with the product to make this move and have most of the user base be merely disgruntled.
- Not really. They increased the price massively with the launch of Prime Video and it got even more expensive over the years. It used to cost per year what it is now per month. It was never a free perk.

It's literally a race to the bottom on streaming services before we eventually end up with cable in an app. Or rather multiple apps.

Fuck I hate this timeline.

Seriously, everything that was once good is now either fucked or planning to be fucked.

Finally, that's what everyone has been eagerly waiting for ...

Yeah, what we were always missing after fleeing cable, was the ads that really made each show worth it.
Why can't we just have nice things?
- Because of Capitalism.

Better not be advert breaks in the service I PAY FOR, or else I'm out.

I'm not paying anybody to serve me adverts. Ever.

Their application is already god awful, and their database is built incredibly poorly (what idiot decided that different seasons of one TV show should have entirely separate listings in the database, often making it hard to find?!).

AND, they're constantly trying to shove extra paid stuff down my throat, like something called Paramount+, in the thing I'm already bloody paying for.

I'm already at the edge of my tether with these people for their crappy service. If they introduce advertisment breaks into a service I'm paying for? That would be a direct insult, and I don't stand for that sort of thing.

their database is built incredibly poorly (what idiot decided that different seasons of one TV show should have entirely separate listings in the database, often making it hard to find?!).
Likely this is legacy from when you would buy each season as a DVD set
- Paramount Plus is the worst streaming service with the second best content
- I read somewhere that streaming content has to be filed with a weight and dimensions because their database only understands packages.
Slap Jeff with a glove

People use prime video? I find that half the shit I click on, it tells me it's not included with prime and I have to buy it..

I hate this. Let me hide everything that isn't included.
Same, I've only watched one or two shows that have actually been included with Prime....don't know if I'm just looking for the wrong shows/movies though

Wow, first they destroy Prime Music to push you to pay extra for Music Unlimited and now this? I have no idea what the value of Prime even is now unless you order online frequently, which is harder and harder to justify with all the shady and low quality sellers polluting the site.

The enshitification will continue until there isn't any cent left to transfer to the shareholders.

Rent seeking. It's called rent seeking. People keep calling it "enshitification" as if this is a new thing.
- Rent seeking is just a part of enshitification

I've been planning on cancelling prime at the end of the year. This closes the decision making process for me.

I've been sticking to Pluto and Tubi lately. Yes, they have ads, but they are entirely free and have enough content to keep me entertained for the duration of my ever decreasing television watching habits.

(End of year because due to terms and conditions, there is no benefit to cancel early)

- My experience with prime delivery in 2023 is that it has gone from two days to four days to two weeks to completely lost fuck you trying to get a refund.
  Further, I stopped using eBay in the late 2000s because everything there became "fell off a truck in China" quality. This is what a vast percentage of Amazon product has become.
  This is the crux desire to cancel.
- Same, I often forget that prime video exists, I pay for prime so my wife’s packages arrive quicker and I get a free twitch sub monthly
- I canceled last time they raised the price and started including football. The only thing prime is really good for is if you like making a bunch of little purchases frequently. I honestly don't miss it at all. When I do buy something, you get free shipping on anything else you buy for the next 24 hours. That ends up covering the little stuff I might have forgotten on the original order and prime shipping was rarely 2 days anymore anyway, so what's an extra day or two wait.

Prime already has ads and they are obnoxious. They are their own ads. Is outside ads the new development or what? New tiers?

Remember folks who are currently subscribed: They do not give prorated refunds for full year subs. ~~When you cancel the service ends immediately. Setup calendar reminders or eat the sunk cost now because~~ Amazon Prime is just a typical subscription entrapment scheme that will only get harder and harder to cancel, like a gym membership.

Edit: Thanks /u/@firadin - Cancel now, you don't lose anything and the membership simply won't renew on your renewal date.

That's not accurate, they don't stop your benefits when you hit the cancel button. I just cancelled today and have my benefits until the end of my yearly subscription in November.
- Wow, you're right. I just ended mine.
  Their website has an asshole design. They make you click through two pages before telling you the truth.

This isn't even really normal entshitification, they added videos and some music cheap Spotify knockoff to their fast delivery flat rate. Nobody asked them to.

Then they slowly raised the price, essentially locking everyone that just wanted free fast delivery into a video streaming service and kept increasing the price.

They did this to force existing subscribers into their "new" business idea of a video streaming service, when they couldn't yet compete with the competition back then. Good news for them, their competitors are shit now.

Now they can include advertisements in it too and add more expensive advertisement free tiers. Essentially increasing the price again, but hiding it so people can't ask for subscription fees back in Europe.

Do they really think most people have forgotten they just wanted a fast delivery flat rate? They will never offer their delivery flat rate without video and all that stuff again, only if a legislature would force them.

And increasingly I'm finding that they're making me place a minimum order size to get the free shipping. You know - like shipping was without prime.

Lol that’s a nope from me, dawg. I’ll bail on that once I start seeing ads on a thing I pay for.

Trillion dollar company doesn't care. You'll get ads and they will take your money. Like it or not.

Just in time for me to finish Invincible and fuck off

They aren't doing it because they have to, they're doing it to make money.

I just cancelled. Was thinking about doing it during the last price hike but never got around to it. Good thing they announced it now since it was going to renewed on the 15th of October.

It already fucking has one!! And I have prime!! what the fuck

yar har fiddle dee dee

So glad I cancelled Prime a few months ago. Turns out, I’m still getting free shipping even without it and I didn’t find Rings of Power worth pirating.

Time to ditch Prime.

TBH, it was a long ago, but this is the last straw.

Amazon Prime hasn't been good for years. There's no reason to pay for it.
If amazon was smart they would have not included their streaming service in their free shipping subscription but now it just feels like an expensive bloated product with minimal value.
I used to think I ought to cancel.
I still do, but I used to, too.

"We aim to provide a meaningfully worse experience than the sailors of the seven seas are getting," Amazon insisted.

At the bottom of article…

Users will have the option to buy an ad-free subscription for an additional $2.99 per month, while the current prices will give them the version with ads.

Translation: Amazon is raising the price of Prime by $3/month. For comparison, Prime Video is currently $9/month.

Wow, that’s actually really shitty. They should have just raised the prices by $24, and announced a cheaper version of prime with ads. Nobody would have questioned it.

Meanwhile, me, pirating like a chad

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I have had prime for a decade and never once watched their content on their platform. WEB-DL baby

So ads, charging for shipping on many products, and costing $140 a year? Hmm.

Prime is still worth it to me for the free shipping, but I won't be watching their video if I have to watch ads and I certainly won't be paying extra for the privilege of not having to watch them.

I really hate the "free shipping" line. It's not free, you are literally paying a monthly fee for it, even if you buy nothing. That is in no way "free".
Are you really buying from Amazon more than twice a month? If yes, stop/wait and combine shipments. If not, cancel prime because even at their now-standard $6 shipping per order, you'd break even or save $6-$12.
I've taught my parents this, and they now see the idiocy in buying things the second they think of them, even if they won't use it for weeks. A $4 item with $6 shipping is so incredibly stupid, but now that they wait until they "need" a few items, suddenly shipping is $0 because they reached the $35 tipping point. Even at the 'discounted' federal assistance price level of prime (I'm disabled), it made no sense.
- That, and they claim you get "faster" shipping with Prime but in my area at least they always manage to fuck it up, so they wind up delivering every single order days or sometimes a week later than they originally promised. I therefore have no desire to pay them a bribe just to fuck up anyway; they stuff I order without Prime gets here in the same time frame 95% of the time. It's literally worthless.

Oh awesome, great for users. I hope they increase the price of prime again with it!

Prime Video was my favourite =(

For the first time I was contemplating cancelling my prime subscription,but now I believe the contemplation is over.

I keep forgetting that I have Amazon video.

It's trash.

They already show ads though. Just for their own content after every episode.

It's made me stop using their service because it's annoying enough as it is.

Also those make me despise the advertised show and refuse to watch it already.

This might make me reconsider my prime subscription. I already find prime video a bit lacking but combined with free shipping I find the service as a whole worth paying for, however I’m not sure I order enough for free shipping alone to be worth it

yarr

I was contemplating to subscribe to Prime as they have some interesting (for me) exclusive stuff, but was hesitating to add just another subscription.

Thank you, Amazon, to make the decision so easy - if even a paid subscription is riddled with ads, it is a 100% no-buy for me.

Crappy move Amazon. Real crappy