Ad nausea: Amazon Prime Video will start adding adds to your stream this month


As we reported last year, Amazon is going to start putting adverts in Prime Video for paying subscribers this year – and that advertising starts later this month on January 29. If you want to keep your ad-free viewing you’ll need to pay extra for it: $2.99 a month in the US and £2.99 per month in the UK. The ad-free option will cover everything but live sports, which will continue to include ads.
Amazon’s email sent last night to subscribers and its previous blog post tries to portray this as a good thing: the ads are coming to make your TV experience better! The introduction of ads “will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers.”
But of course it’s not about making your experience better any more than filling your Amazon search results with products from the Shenzen Dangerous Toy and Lawn Mower Company was about making Amazon more useful: like other streaming services, Amazon is finding that streaming is costing more and bringing in less than it hoped. So this is a one-two punch of revenue raising: Amazon will either get more money from putting ads in your shows, or by persuading you to pay to get rid of them.
What Amazon ads mean for you
That very much depends on the show. For shows made for what streamers used to tell 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 are supposed to go without interrupting the flow. But for shows made without ads in mind, the experience is likely to be the same as I’m getting on FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV) channels such as Amazon’s Freevee, where ads interrupt key scenes at random with no respect for continuity.
What we’re seeing here is part of a bigger picture that applies to music streaming too: what begins as disruptive, with tech firms promising to cut the cost and boost the convenience of accessing media, eventually starts to resemble the very things it was set up in opposition to – such as broadcast TV with its ads, or cable with its expensive subscriptions.
Amazon isn’t the only streamer facing tough competition and increasing costs now that the era of effectively free borrowing has come to an end, but it’s unique in the way that it combines Prime Video with its wider Prime service: if you decide you hate the ads and want to cancel, that means canceling your other Prime benefits too such as faster free delivery, Amazon Photos and so on. That makes Prime Video stickier than the likes of Netflix, which you can just cancel without then having to wait longer for your pet food and gadgets to be delivered.
As we reported last year, Amazon is going to start putting adverts in Prime Video for paying subscribers this year – and that advertising starts later this month on January 29. If you want to keep your ad-free viewing you’ll need to pay extra for it: $2.99 a month in the…
Recent Posts
- Race to 100TB HDD heats up as Seagate pulls rug under Western Digital, Toshiba feet by acquiring HAMR-specialist
- New video leak may have revealed the full Nothing Phone 3a and Phone 3a Pro design
- Best Action Cameras (2025), Tested and Reviewed
- Hades II just keeps getting better
- The iPhone 16e is here, and I just can’t believe how expensive it is
Archives
- February 2025
- January 2025
- December 2024
- November 2024
- October 2024
- September 2024
- August 2024
- July 2024
- June 2024
- May 2024
- April 2024
- March 2024
- February 2024
- January 2024
- December 2023
- November 2023
- October 2023
- September 2023
- August 2023
- July 2023
- June 2023
- May 2023
- April 2023
- March 2023
- February 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- November 2022
- October 2022
- September 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- June 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- September 2018
- October 2017
- December 2011
- August 2010