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Comment by spl757 | Hacker News Reader

I remember when I had Amazon Prime ad-free tier. Then they added ads to the ad-free tier, and then I found out to get what I was already paying for, they now want $36 more per year. I mean, that's just blatant bait and switch.

It's some criminal gangster saying "hey that's a nice free ad-tier, shame if something happened to it. Listen, you pay me $36/year for protection, and all this goes away. Capice?"

Remember when the appeal was that streaming was cheaper than cable? So, yeah. Shareholders were not going to just take that lying down when they know what can squeeze their consumers far harder than they anticipated.

Plus, they are now removing movies that you have "bought" or "purchased" while offering NO refunds.

"If buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing" -Cory Doctorow

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That seems like revisionist history. Amazon started out with Prime Video bundled with Prime as a whole, and didn't raise the price. After 5-6 years they made it an add-on, then they added an ad-supported tier.

But if anything, the racket is bundling free shipping with ad-free video and everything else. Raising prices periodically to keep up with inflation is not a racket. And whether you would prefer to get downgraded to the advertising plan or automatically pay more is a personal choice, and automatically downgrading you rather than renewing you at a higher price is in some ways a more sensible default. (Though I'd prefer to be upgraded to the higher price generally and be notified so I have the option to downgrade or cancel, though downgrade really isn't an option I would consider.)

The primary issue is that many people prepaid for a year of Prime, which included ad-free streaming, and that ad-free service was changed mid-contract. I’d have no problem if the included streaming tier or overall price was changed at renewal.

That's fair, changing mid-year is definitely a problem and arguably illegal under current law, though really if we had functional antitrust I'm not sure that bundling would be legal to begin with.

They rolled out the new ToS to all customers, the original ToS they agreed to when signing up gave Disney permission to do that. There is nothing illegal going on here.

They are assholes that lost my business forever for doing shady shit. I had paid for an annual plan with no-ads. It doesn't have to be illegal to be anti-consumer. I vote with my wallet.

Agreed, good on you for having principles and sticking to them.

There's obviously a limit to what you can change via ToS. Yes, their ToS says they can alter the deal at their discretion. Adding ads to a premium ad-free tier seems like fundamentally a violation of the presumed contract. (Specifically talking about one-year plans, saying that they can make these kinds of fundamental alterations to the deal mid-year sounds like it ought to be illegal if they're selling one-year plans.)

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