Amazon Prime Video won't be ad-free in 2024 without an additional charge
Amazon Prime Video will include "limited" advertising during shows and movies starting in early 2024, requiring customers to pay an additional fee to remove the ads.
Amazon says the move will allow the company "to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time." The announcement goes on to say that the company aims to have "meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers."
If customers do not want to see advertisements, they will need to pay $2.99 per month to remove the advertisements as part of a new "ad-free option."
The company has not given an exact date for the change, but Amazon says it will alert Prime members several weeks before the ads are introduced. It will also provide instructions on how to sign up for the ad-free option.
In June, the FTC said that Amazon had enrolled millions of customers into the paid subscription service without their consent. When customers attempted to cancel Prime, they faced a multi-step process designed to be deliberately difficult.
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Comments
I'm just annoyed by how TV+ displays previews of other shows at the beginning of its own shows, same as Prime Video. Sure, it is definitely effective at surfacing content that may not have otherwise been discovered, but I choose those services specifically for the content that I choose, not to have content pushed onto me.
Eh. Privacy scmivacy. Who would allow themselves to be tracked?
The UHD stream quality seems garbage compared with AppleTV+ and Disney+. I won’t miss not watching the service at all. It’s just frustrating that it cannot be unbundled from the delivery service
This is just a stealth price increase for profit. The “ increase investment in content” will take 2-3 years to manifest by which time I will be outraged at something else
That said I periodically sign up for one month of Prime — in late November — and so I’d happily kick in another three bucks to sample a few shows on Prime Video during that month, ad-free. But over $175 per year ($140 — assuming it doesn’t go up again, which it certainly will, plus $3x12) for Prime (including Prime Video ad-free)?
Prime is awful for finding viewable content, in my opinion, so I now consider Prime just a $3.00 to $4.00 weekly shipping subscription, and not much more.