Amazon to add limited ads to Prime Video starting in early 2024

They obviously have the advantage of people having Prime for deliveries and the inertia required to change shopping habits.

Like you, I think this is a step too far and I will gladly suffer the inconvenience of buying stuff from other retailers in the future.

While this is true, Netflix hiked prices massively over the years. Their 4K/HDR offering is 17.99 EUR per month here. Amazon Prime including Prime Video is still 8.99 EUR/month, cheaper if paid yearly, without any surcharge for 4K/HDR. So that's more than twice the price for a comparable streaming service.

...and the no-ads tier is only available in the US.

Looks like I'll be cancelling prime video as no ads is really important to me.

When I was paying for Netflix, I still found it easier to download the shows I was interested in watching as this permitted me to remember my place, dodge their shitty player UI, and not deal with crappy internet problems causing the stream to change to potato quality at random moments.

Most of these problems aren't a thing with physical media. Honestly I want to pay for content to support the creators, but that's what I want to pay for. I'm not paying to use your shitty player app and I'm not paying for draconian DRM that lets you take the content away from me later, or restrict the devices I can play the content on, or tell me I can't watch my movie on a flight with no wifi, etc. The payment is on my honor, because the content is frankly stupidly simple to access for absolutely free if I really want to, and that's not going to change. Data isn't going to get *harder* to copy over time. Just let me pay the artists as directly as possible, because that's where I want the money to go, to support their work. Can we make that a thing?

It’s not even worth pirating, the library near me is jammed full of Blu-rays and DVDs.

The big issue in my opinion is that movie execs have this misguided belief that if you stop people from pirating your content, every prevented download will turn into a sale at full price.

But I expect that people will simply stop watching mediocre movie and low-effort series. Or wait for rebates, like those people who avoid cinema and then rent the bluray later. As a result of this misunderstanding, they try technical solutions and the effect is that probably every 2nd person who reads this has Sonar setup to fuel their "web-dl subscription" to Prime. The correct solution would be to lower prices (and that somewhat includes less ads) to make it more attractive to pay for that content. And they will need that strategy anyway to survive a direct competition with Disney = the Marvel cinematic universe.

I myself cancelled Netflix when I noticed that none of the people I talk to regularly care enough about their Netflix shows to remember the story... And from that I concluded that it must be mostly filler content.

I haven't used Amazon for years but it's amazing they were able to include all of the things you mentioned for the price. Fast Shipping, video, music.

But the only way I can look at it is the consumer benefits while the rest are either subsidized or screwed over. Fulfillment workers are in horrible conditions, musicians make nothing on their music, and filmmakers lose their royalities and pay and increasingly become a sort of gig worker.

stremio + torrentio + real debrid 34 usd/yr for cached torrents streamed over https

And their library is second to none.

> I'm old enough to remember when "Cable TV" meant "no advertisements."

You must be infinitely old then, because "Cable TV" at its inception had ads. Cable TV was originally just bundling all the local stations, and it was like that for thirty years. So the first thirty years of cable had ads. Even most of the first few cable-only TV stations had ads. The second cable-only TV station, WTBS, had ads. Nickelodeon, ESPN, CNN, USA, all had ads from their start and were some of the very first cable-only TV stations.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2020/11/02/the-rise-...

For Christmas, we present you the new subscription with unlimited ads!

> Allows more customers to access a service, for free, with the same quality.

Being interrupted and attempted to be brainwashed every X minutes is not “the same quality”.

Interesting in that once consumers get a taste of an ad-free platform, forever will they wish to return. Ads may be the only way media content as a business makes any money but this really is more telling of where Prime is today. They are losing money. I refuse to watch ads. I block them on all my devices. I don’t watch networks and content that has them. I’ve had a taste of an ad free world and I will do everything in my power to return. If I have a need for something, I’ll research. I would rather go back to pirating content than $20/mo for “limited ads”. It’s fucking Cable all over again.

>Allows more customers to access a service, for free, with the same quality.

But prime's not free. Also the video quality is terrible.

>Imagine having to pay for every single service/website we use daily

Then that's their fault for having an untenable business model, not the user's fault for expecting the free service to remain free.

Anyways, in the AI age user generated content has an intrinsic value as training material so submitting posts to social media sites is basically a transaction.

> and even consumers need it. It allows us to notice things we might need in our lives

Just so I'm clear, are you actually trying to say that ads are good for viewers? Do you personally like ads? Do you use an ad blocker? Are you happy when you see an unskippable 15 second tax on your time?

>Imagine having to pay for every single service/website we use daily

I wish. Ads are a cancer.

No we don't need ads for products, since products worth buying are worth people remarking about them, so we hear of the through a filter.

Ads don't make services cheaper - you end up paying for the products, the creation of the ad and the overhead, meaning you pay more in the end.

Except Amazon Prime continues to be a paid service. I quickly stopped watching prime because they already had excessive advertising, I can only imagine how much worse the service is becoming.

Hope you forgot the sarcasme sign.

Seriously doubt that every company needs "marketing". And refuse to believe that consumers need it.

It's only more efficient in screwing over the customer, you are paying the same amount for less of the video you want to watch.

It's a shame really, my family had Sky TV about a decade ago and it always baffled me how you pay for the extra channels and then they still have ad breaks.

> Ad-supported is one of the most efficient business models on both the consumer side and business side.

I'm not sure about that. Detach Prime Video from Amazon, Youtube from Google, Hulu from Disney and then maybe we'd see. As it is, these services all look like loss leaders.

> Imagine having to pay for every single service/website we use daily

I'd love to. If we lived in a world where micro-transactions were simple and inexpensive I would love to pay (how much it costs to serve me my content)+(20% overhead for profit). At least my money would be going to the publisher.

There were/are a few companies out there that, for a monthly subscription price, give you paywalled content. They sucked because they were selective about that content, but the idea of paying a clearing house a monthly fee, and having a piece of JS on _everybody's_ site that recognized me and provided the content with no ads and no tracking actually makes me want to take off my tin-foil hat and embrace the internet panopticon.

There's a necessity in society for some form of advertising. People and businesses want to communicate what products and services are available. If a random person wants the ability to start their own business, they're going to need the ability to advertise that they have a new product that they want people to try. Or they want to advertise that there's some societal issue that they want people to be aware of.

Consider a world with zero ads. There wouldn't be annoying interruptions. But we also wouldn't ever learn which new movies are playing, which political candidates are running, etc, except from 2nd and 3rd hand sources with several layers of spin (and misunderstanding/misinformation) on the information.

I personally hate the current state of direct advertising. There seems to be zero prevention of fraud and zero work towards making ads less annoying. I wish that consensual forms of media could convey all that information instead, in an unbiased, informed, and timely manner. Unfortunately that isn't currently happening for several reasons (media underfunding, editorial conflicts of interest, personalized content streams that preclude any sort of unexpected news).

I'm not sure what the solution is overall. I think if every company didn't deliver absolute buckets of trash to their own email marketing lists, then we wouldn't block them and they wouldn't have to pay to ruin our other media.

I just love how versatile that word is :)

And yes, this one is a great example of how you can turn your paying customers into being the product that you sell (in addition to charging them) to satisfy your greed.

People do it all the time. Cable tv.

I get ads all the time every time I walk into the library. Curated displays showcasing whatever author or topic they're trying to push at the time. Is that not advertising?

Not that I mind. I often find neat things in these displays that I might not have thought to look for otherwise. But isn't that kind of the point of ads, to get people to look for things they might not have otherwise known or considered?

You have to wonder as a species if we have too much entertainment, all the endless tv shows, movies, it's hyper production of mostly forgettable noise and variations on the same few recycled themes. Instead we might be better of with less but better quality content or turn to various activities and socializing for fun.

The streaming bait and switch is another example of Silicon Valley 'disrupting' entertainment by ignoring its history, and then throwing ads back in claiming there was no other way.

The arts have only ever flourished under formal systems of patronage; the need for immediate commercial viability is what has led us to a landscape of every service offering 10 comic book/fantasy novel adaptations for every 1 original screenplay.

Indeed. Even Amazon third-party has good deals on used discs. I miss FamilyVideo who had tons of rental discs for sale for $2-$5 during sales and $5-10 normally.

It used to be good old shows or movies which cable viewers used to or may still watch more of. I never watched anything on it. Terrible UI.

Then, they started making more shows and movies that were good so I watched them. The pre-roll advertisements started but were skippable annoyances.

Now ad supported platforms are mixed in with prime content unless you select prime only. UI is bad again. Movies/shows stop in the middle while the app is loading ads or something. The content hasn’t improved much and the “new” section is back to old shows and movies. Back to not watching again.

Idk 1-2 day shipping would change for me since the distribution center is closer than the grocery store. I don’t think the three times I needed overnight shipping and two actually went through are worth the yearly charge. Two day shipping gets rescheduled often also.

I think I depends how the show is license. Prime video (the app) has content from other sources that have ads. But shows licensed directly by Prime don’t have ads. Or something like that.