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Amazon Is in Talks to Offer Free Mobile Service to US Prime Members
- LurkerAtTheGate 3y agoSo, following Google's example, a la Google Fi?
- bombcar 3y agoThe problem with bundling is it becomes harder to justify the more stuff you do not use. Prime Video already caused this for those who just wanted shipping.
- next_xibalba 3y agoI expect you are in the minority in terms of rationale. For most people, the more you get in the bundle, the greater the incentive, the faster the flywheel spins for Amazon. This is why bundling is both so powerful as a strategy and is also often the target of anti-competitive complaints.
- cowsup 3y agoThat opinion becomes the majority when they increase the cost as well. Similar services have emailed me over the years, saying that, since they're continuing to grow and provide more benefits, they have to raise the price as well. It's one thing when it goes from the $7/month I paid for Prime way-back-when to the $15/month I pay now. But the average phone plans are more expensive than that, on their own. So, if Prime offers this for all members, and a large percent end up using it, they'll have to raise prices in order to remain profitable. If this were truly the "Free Mobile Service" offered in the title, that'd be one thing. But that's not how business works.
- bombcar 3y agoExactly - we saw the same exact thing with cable, where they kept bundling more and more channels until the basic cable subscription is $80 and people started saying "why am I paying this?"
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoAmazon's appeal is that any one of its services would be a decent price for what you get for the whole bundle. I pay $10 for my Prime membership when to get the same 4k video streaming on Netflix it is $20. With that $10 I also get free shipping and all these other features that I don't care if I use or not because just the video and shipping is a deal. If the prime price was $30 it'd be totally different math, but it's not, it's a deal any way I cut it.
- tedivm 3y agoYeah at this point I view Amazon Prime as a streaming service with an extremely odd set of perks. It's also interesting the various bundles- I found out about the Grubhub+ one, which is normally $9.99 a month and is free with Prime. If you use one or two of the services bundles it ends up being an obvious money saver.
- JackFr 3y agoDon’t forget WholeFoods perks.
- ghaff 3y agoFor me, Prime is the shipping. I don't know how much I'd pay for video streaming. Probably not much. And I've never used any of the random add-ons. (But then I don't use grocery/food delivery at all.)
- bombcar 3y agoI should setup a program that can digest the amazon export of all orders and tell you how much it actually saved you (especially if you're in an area that is no longer getting 2nd day, or you use the "amazon day" thing). Because you get free shipping anyway with an order of $35 or more. I can't actually see how much shipping is below that without creating a new account, but I doubt it's entirely excessive. Walmart of all places is starting to eat into my Prime usage, and I'm going to cancel after this year runs out and see how it goes.
- 3y ago
- bentcorner 3y agoThe flip side is that this makes Prime much more sticky - if you want to cancel Prime you need to find a new mobile provider and port your number over. There's no way they keep Prime at the same price while also adding mobile service, but I guess we'll have to wait and see. Or maybe they do and start raising Prime prices in a year or two, knowing that said sticky-ness will keep people on Prime even if it starts costing close to the amount you'd pay for individual mobile service anyway.
- anon223345 3y agoI actually cancelled prime because Amazon products these days suck, it’s become literally flea market shit I probably would use Amazon cell phone service, but would be good if I could just buy that, not all of prime
- vlovich123 3y agoIf they can take over my monthly phone bill that’s a huge gap. Prime is what $150? What almost 10x cheaper than my phone bill. Of course, the odds that it will offer an equivalent feature set is probably minimal so there will be a switching cost.
- Arubis 3y agoYour phone bill is approaching $1500 annually? What are your parameters? Unless that’s unlimited data lines for a family with lots of added devices, that’s a ton of money.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago$1.5k is pretty much the going rate for two phones with unlimited and non-terrible tethering.
- IggleSniggle 3y agoIt’s really not that huge a jump. For a single phone line with tethering, ATT will run you $1200 annually. My budget provider with deprioritized service but on a similar plan is $540. A Prime membership covers a household, but anyway you measure it, $150 is close enough to “one order of magnitude less” to be useful as an approximation.
- dhdhhdd 3y ago$240 Annum for 15GB mint mobile.
- 3y ago
- fisherjeff 3y agoI love it. Just keep jamming more random stuff in there and periodically saying, “you know, we give you so many amazing benefits that we just have no choice but to raise the membership fee again!”
- LanceH 3y agoOr split it off like they did with music storage (and deleting all but 250 of my stored songs), then peppering me with requests to upgrade to prime music 24/7. I use prime because I have enough need for the shipping aspects of it that it works out favorably. Prime video is a very nice bonus. Beyond that, there is a lot of hassle to being connected to Amazon. All their e-readers and audible can't help but advertise incessantly. These are apps where I want to open to the same place maybe a hundred times in a row as I read or listen to a long book. Yet, every time, it opens to the store page and I have drill down through my library to find my current book. If I'm on to my next book and search for it while in the library section of the app, it will pull up results from the store as well.
- ghaff 3y agoI feel similarly. Even pre-pandemic, the fact that I could often order something through Amazon and get it before I would have gotten around to driving 5 miles to the store is absolutely worth the membership and Prime Video is a nice enough bonus. Ads are a pain on Kindle though I could admittedly spend the money to make them at least partly go away. Music I don't really care about as I get Apple on another bundle.
- dsizzle 3y agohttps://archive.is/ih4FP https://archive.is/ih4FP
- tezza 3y agoA bit close to the Kingsman (2014) plot…
- anaganisk 3y agoPretty sure Bezos doesn't want to be a saviour of anybody or thing. On the other hand if Musk introduced a phone.
- spywaregorilla 3y agothe kingsmen movies are... such an uncommon niche. It's got aggressively american populist plots, but its written in a classic hollywood style that glosses over in a way that people don't seem to notice that it's so unusual. People remember the action scenes. They don't remember the main plot points about the elites and the government actively conspiring to kill off the poor as a popular class-wide mentality. the advertisements do this too. They're very much just showing the cool action scenes. very strange.
- ksey3 3y agoThis is interesting. I hope it grows in scope cuz AT&T needs to go die already. I dont know how big Telcos havent been gobbled up by larger groups yet. They are such a slow moving gigantic revenue generating juicy targets. Big tech (advertising/media/cloud) is not big enough to do the gobbling. But big retail Walmart/Amazon are most def large enough to take out AT&T. And hope they do so cause I prefer dealing with them than the telcos.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoATT/Verizon/T-Mobile are dumb pipes subject to lots of regulation. The only one with decent profit margin is Verizon, and they are already the most expensive. ATT is loaded up with debt from stupid attempts to not just be a dumb pipe, and I do not see much upside from buying any of them. Any future cash flows are surely already priced in since they are all basically utilities, and I do not see where the efficiency/synergy gains would be for another business to merge with them.
- op00to 3y agoTelcos gobbled media.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoOnly Comcast did successfully, but it remains to be seen how successfully. ATT and Verizon both failed, with ATT failing big (tens of billions wasted).
- flakeoil 3y agoI think you have your numbers wrong. Big tech is in some cases 10-20 times bigger than AT&T (market valuation). Big retail is just around double if you look at Walmart and everyone else much smaller (if you remove Amazon which I count as big tech). I'm not quite sure it would be a benefit for the end users to have big tech also own the wireless networks.
- gsatic 3y agoI don't think so. Revenue wise they are much larger than tech. Big tech is mostly advertising.
- bcardarella 3y agoIn exchange for...
- jrmiii 3y ago...your data of course. Which is, I'm confident, what you're saying. It will be interesting what the privacy policy & controls will look like on something like this, particularly given the COPPA issues Amazon is recently dealing with. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-response-to-ftc-settlement-regarding-alexa https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-re...
- anaganisk 3y agoYour private conversations, text messages from various services, and people etc etc
- tyingq 3y agoThis would almost surely cannibalize big parts of existing business for whatever carrier signs on and just transfer the margins to Amazon. I'm pretty curious if Amazon really has the leverage to make that happen.
- refulgentis 3y agoSomething is off: - unlimited service - for free, maybe $10/month - vague "increase loyalty/stickiness" claims - Amazon fired 30K people in last 6 months due to "economic conditions" Is it 2008 or 2018? Alternatively, when are we unionizing?
- karaterobot 3y agoI buy pretty much everything off Amazon, and even I would not pass all my cellphone data through them. That sounds like sheer stupidity.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoI would just be happy if there was a way I could simply buy and download audiobooks instead it’s some kafkaesque kabuki dance/rube Goldberg machine required to listen to an audiobook without getting into a long-term monopolistic audible subscription
- firstlink 3y agoYou can buy and download audiobooks on audible. Stripping the drm (for personal archival purposes) is so easy I can only imagine it was made intentionally weak to capture a certain segment of the market.
- booleandilemma 3y agoThrow the word "byzantine" in there too.
- 35997279 3y agoLibro.fm is a good alternative. No DRM.
- dublinben 3y agoYou can buy and download individual audiobooks on Downpour.com, which come free of any DRM. You can find a long list of DRM-free audiobook sources here: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks
- rabidonrails 3y agoAmazon spokesperson was just quoted denying this. "We're always exploring adding more benefits for prime members but we do not have plans to add wireless at this time." Reported by CNBC at 9:40ET
- ctvo 3y agoOh boy. I can see it now: By accepting this offer, you agree that Amazon has the right to collect anonymized web traffic data. This helps us improve your customer experience and offer you more relevant product suggestions when you search on Amazon.com and other Amazon affiliated properties. Edit: More interestingly perhaps, this allows Amazon to bypass the tracking restrictions at the platform level (say enforced by Apple, and has harmed Facebook). Dropping to the network infrastructure level may make attribution and tracking on Amazon Advertising best in class across not just Amazon.com, but other properties? I don't know enough about the space so just musing, but I can't help feel this is a major development that's a bit more than Prime members now get more free stuff.
- paxys 3y agoAll existing providers are doing exactly this. AT&T even has a plan where you can pay extra (something like $30/mo) to opt out of tracking.
- xnx 3y agoThis has to be some of the expected value for Amazon, but I would still trust Amazon more than other carriers (Verizon, AT&T, etc.).
- ldelossa 3y agoLol, I read this comment and immediately went "No way". Then thought about it for another second then agreed. Then thought about it for longer and said "No way again". Honestly, I'm stumped on this one haha, which is an interesting place to be, contemplating who's more evil.
- booleandilemma 3y agoWill they include ads on my phone lock screen? I want an experience like I have with my Kindle.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 35997279 3y agothis would put Amazon as the provider for most people’s only 2FA. Bleh.
- kmfrk 3y agoThis is quite the timing after settling with the FTC for having no guard rails for employee access to Ring surveillance: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/ftc-says-ring-employees-illegally-surveilled-customers-failed-stop-hackers-taking-control-users https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...
- zaroth 3y agoHow did I miss this?! Amazon employees had unrestricted access to all stored and live Ring video? Just one employee they mention used it to watch 50,000 videos of women in their homes… And they paid just $5.8mm to settle.
- deutschepost 3y agoIf privacy of users isn‘t forced on these companies, there will be a future where watching nude photos and videos of their customers will be a corporate benefit for Amazon executives.
- version_five 3y agoIs it byod or do you need to use an amazon Fire phone and everything that would entail?
- antisthenes 3y agoThe Amazon Fire Phone has been discontinued 7 years ago.
- version_five 3y agoI meant a special amazon phone generically.
- stonogo 3y agoI remember the last time Amazon offered free mobile service. It was quietly discontinued after a couple years.
- kotaKat 3y agoAre you thinking of Kindle Whispernet? I do miss being able to use my early Kindle 2 with the 'experimental web browser' and go beyond the walled garden, but the later 3G Kindles that were still walled off to Amazon and at least Wikipedia were still really nice for quick mobile referencing.
- csense 3y ago> Free Mobile Service to US Prime Members How exactly is mobile service "free" if Prime is a product you have to pay for?
- nazgulsenpai 3y agoFor a while, and maybe still now, you could buy Motorola phones on Amazon for a lower price, but with the lock-screen ads that the Kindle Fire range uses. No thank you!
- tibbydudeza 3y agoThere is warehouse in Seattle with Amazon Fire Phones :).
- nunez 3y agoThis would be perfect for my work phone (i.e. a semi-disposable line), especially since my phone is connected to my home network through Tailscale (i.e. WireGuard) pretty much 24x7
- drtz 3y agoI canceled Prime a while back, and I couldn't believe how full of dark patterns Amazon is when you're not a Prime member. "Free" shipping can easily turn into $6-$12 if you're not careful at checkout.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoI guess we have to ask ourselves: how much do we trust Amazon and what would goods and services would be being willing to purchase from them? houses? trains? ships? elevators? airplanes? pacemakers?