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Amazon Prime Video starts showing ads in January unless you pay $2.99/month xtra

• nextworddev 3y ago
  Shrinkflation, shitflation will be the mega trend for the next 5 years, started from 2020
  • brunoqc 3y ago
    Enshittification
• qainsights 3y ago
  Starting from January 29, 2024, Amazon Prime Video will begin showing ads alongside content unless customers pay an additional fee of $2.99 per month. This change is aimed at allowing Amazon to continue investing in compelling content and increasing its investment over a long period of time. Customers can avoid ads by paying the additional fee on top of their monthly or yearly Amazon Prime subscription.
• figassis 3y ago
  I feel piracy today is pretty morally excused.
  • paulcole 3y ago
    I don’t. I know there are things that people expect me to pay money for and I feel bad about taking things that I know I shouldn’t. And I don’t subscribe to the “but my HTTP requests” rationalization that’s so common here on HN.
    • argiopetech 3y ago
      Out of personal curiosity, how far does this go for you? Would you download (without paying for) - an old film (the Maltese Falcon, Wizard of Oz, Wings [1927 silent film]) - a really bad film (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians) - something you already own but don't have access to at the moment - anime - none of the above?
      • thfuran 3y ago
        >- anime Are you expecting they might have some beef with Japan in particular?
        • argiopetech 3y ago
          Perhaps I should have generalized to "cartoons", or whatever watch-once fluff you might spend an hour or four a week on.
          • deleted 3y ago
            [deleted]
      • pierat 3y ago
        When buying isnt owning, then piracy is ethical. Its gone too fucking long towards extreme copyright and gimmee programs like the DMCA. Piracy is that counteracting force. Pirate it all. No other lever can make these companies correct.
      • paulcole 3y ago
        None of the above. If I want to watch an old film, a bad film, or an old bad film, I pay for it or I don’t watch it. I’ve bought films on Amazon rather than get off my butt to put the DVD in the player. So you can guess that if I don’t have access to it at the moment that I’ll pay for it. I bought the DVD, I didn’t buy the right to download the movie (unless it was one of those DVDs with a download code included). I have 0 interest in anime.
        • argiopetech 3y ago
          Thanks for taking the time to reply and satisfy my mostly aimless curiosity. As mentioned in a sibling, I probably should have gone with "cartoons" or "drivel" or similar for that category, but "anime" is my particular bias for that category of time waster
    • comprev 3y ago
      Wait until you're 90% through a TV show and your streaming provider removes it from their catalogue. Would you buy the DVD boxset or perhaps the final season? Or maybe download the last few episodes?
      • thfuran 3y ago
        >Wait until you're 90% through a TV show and your streaming provider removes it from their catalogue. Or Sony just steals it from you.
      • paulcole 3y ago
        I mean I don’t get that worked up over those things. I would just buy the DVD if I really wanted to see it. I wouldn’t download the last few episodes.
    • silisili 3y ago
      What about things that aren't even available anymore any way but 'pirating'? I can think of two movies in recent times that just don't exist to rent or buy from any service, likely due to disputes of some nature.
      • paulcole 3y ago
        > What about things that aren't even available anymore any way but 'pirating'? This isn’t as tricky as you think it is! You don’t watch, read, listen to, play, etc. those things.
        • wkat4242 3y ago
          So you let some corpo decide what you're allowed to watch or read? I used to take the "this content is not available in your region" when trying to buy a kindle book as an excuse to pirate. If they don't want my money, they clearly don't care. Now I stopped caring altogether though.
          • paulcole 3y ago
            No, I decide what I watch and read. There’s plenty of things to watch and read. If something isn’t available legally to me, I’ll find something else.
    • yladiz 3y ago
      > I know there are things that people expect me to pay money for and I feel bad about taking things that I know I shouldn’t. I used to think kind of like this, but came to the realization that it doesn't matter, at least for movies. First, it's not "people" that expect you to pay for it, it's corporations, and they don't really make money from you directly; if you pirated a movie instead of buying it, it really makes no difference, because either they came out in the cinema and the companies expect to make as much money as possible from the cinema ticket sales, or it came out on streaming which has a really muddy economic calculation. It's much different than, for example, a band's album on Bandcamp or a short film on Vimeo. Second, you're not even really "taking" something in the sense that you're not depriving someone else of the thing you have now, because it's digital, unlike if you stole a Blu-ray from someone's home or off of a shelf. Thirdly, sometimes it's legitimately not possible to get certain media other than pirating. There are multiple movies that I've wanted to watch and pay for but couldn't because of rights issues, and in those situations I'd have no option but to pirate or ask a friend to "get" me a copy. Essentially, if it's a small artist or filmmaker, support them directly, and if you want to see a movie, go to the cinema to watch it if you can. Shows might be a different matter, but I also think they fall under the same "streaming economics" model where the pirate makes little/no difference in reality and you often can't even pay for the show individually if you wanted to.
    • yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      > I know there are things that people expect me to pay money for If the deal is I give the seller money and get the product, that's fine. But if next month the seller says actually now even though you're paying me I'm going to show you ads anyways, or yeah you gave me money but I've decided to take back the product without refunding you[0]... it is easy to become sympathetic to pirates. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/playstation-is-erasing-1318-seasons-of-discovery-shows-from-customer-libraries/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/playstation-is-erasi...
  • Seattle3503 3y ago
    Why is that?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • wannacboatmovie 3y ago
    So by this logic if the supermarket increased the price of bananas beyond a certain arbitrary threshold you set it becomes okay to steal them? As opposed to, shopping elsewhere, or not eating bananas.
    • thebruce87m 3y ago
      I would get the free, cloned, indistinguishable bananas from the dodgy guy in the alley beside the supermarket.
    • hightrix 3y ago
      No. Because pirating media is no where equivalent to stealing bananas. Stealing a banana deprives the store of the banana and the revenue from the sale of the banana. Pirating media does not deprive anyone of anything. And no, pirated media does not equal lost sale. It does not remove the media from the streaming site nor does it prevent the streaming site from profiting from the piece of media. People need to stop making this analogy as is does not work for digital media.
      • wannacboatmovie 3y ago
        Sorry, can you provide a link to the official list of things that are okay to steal? Are taxes and parking tickets on the list? I feel like I shouldn't have to pay those. > Pirating media does not deprive anyone of anything. And no, pirated media does not equal lost sale. What about software? Should we not have to pay for that either? What about the software you make a living writing? Is that exempt from the list?
        • hightrix 3y ago
          Pirating media is not stealing.
        • travoc 3y ago
          When you read a free book at the public library instead of paying the publisher for it, are you stealing?
  • monetus 3y ago
    It is wild how many things I have discovered through piracy but eventually spent a boatload of money on. Music piracy in particular has been like free advertising ime.
  • thinkingemote 3y ago
    It's like an evil for an evil. Robbing a rich man to buy your kids the latest shoes. It is tending towards robin hood but it's not yet in the "to buy foods to survive" category where the moral argument is better defined.
• andy99 3y ago
  Amazon prime became worthless to me around 2018. I'm surprised anyone still gets value out of it. For those that do, maybe this isn't a big deal. I care much more about how bad and confusing their selection is, dodgy marketplace sellers, and almost everything cheap being not eligible for prime than I do about this. Amazon of the "prime" example of a new-er tech company that bought their way into a monopoly and they used it to gouge people while providing bad service. Uber being the other obvious one.
  • dudul 3y ago
    My XP has been very different. I rarely find an item I want to buy that is not covered by prime. As for video specifically, I mostly watch older shows from the 80s and 90s. Do they have everything I'd like to watch? No, but there is enough to watch an episode a few times a week. However, I won't pay this additional fee and I'll cancel after they show me the 1st ad.
• NickC25 3y ago
  Dumb. You pay for Prime. You pay extra for Prime Video. You now pay even more extra for Prime Video to not show you ads. This is a company worth $1.5 trillion dollars (with a founder worth $175 billion dollars)....yet they can't help themselves but triple-dip? Yeah, no. Arr, matey, I hear the high seas calling.
  • dcgudeman 3y ago
    What does the market cap of the company or the founders net worth have anything to do with the unit economics of operating a streaming business? Netflix, Hulu and others are all exploring charging more or introducing ads. Does that not factor into your analysis at all??
    • mr90210 3y ago
      > What does the market cap of the company or the founders net worth have anything to do with the unit economics of operating a streaming business? For being a sub-product when compared to other streaming platforms, I, the naive me, would expect that Prime wouldn’t be in such a rush to milk money from users and instead they would focus on making the best product they can given that their mother company is wealthy as fuck. Like I said, I am naive.
    • enriquec 3y ago
      Not that I even agree, but I guess the point is that someone so highly paid should be able to find solutions that don't at least feel unfair. I mean most people pay for cable and there's not even a way to not have ads and they increase prices regularly - then again most people do hate the cable companies.
    • worewood 3y ago
      It's like a Ferrari stopping in a tire shop and the owner trying to haggle $10 off the service.
      • comprev 3y ago
        The reason they own a Ferrari might be because they're good at money management including negotiation. The local "cheap" supermarket (Lidl) to me has plenty of >€70k vehicles in the carpark.
• keikobadthebad 3y ago
  I got Dark Patterned into prime a few years ago. I was a low volume purchaser anyway and only used prime video for a handful of shows, I never used the music service since access to it was just another flagrant lock-in. I left Prime in Aug. I was surprised with the things I bought since then, despite the quoted delivery being wose, they all actually arrived next day anyway. And I did not miss prime video at all. Since I'm not paying to make my eyeballs available you're not even going to make the ad money off me. The ads are just punishing the people still giving them money for prime.
  • ocdtrekkie 3y ago
    My understanding is Super Saver Shipping is more or less "when convenient for us". So if, like me, you live somewhere Prime trucks are on your street every day anyways, Prime doesn't offer any real speed improvement. Maybe if something is only available at a distant warehouse they won't spend anything extra getting it to you quickly but in most cases... yeah, it's still in two days. I also find Super Saver helps me spend less: I won't order something unless my order is big enough for free shipping, and half the time by the time it is, I decide I didn't really need something or other anyways.
    • blisterpeanuts 3y ago
      During a recent stretch of non-Prime membership, I found that Ebay sellers often were equivalent or 5% above Amazon prices, so if I was in a hurry, go to Ebay. Otherwise, just add to Amzn cart.
• heelix 3y ago
  The Amazon video experience has gotten bad. You use to be able to do a 'free for me'. Now it is a mix of 'free', ads, and rentals - combined with the netflix style of showing categories of content, highlighting the same shows, obscuring how much content is actually there.
  • wtallis 3y ago
    I cancelled Prime when they removed the "free to me" option. They basically turned half of the video catalog pages into ads, the same as their shopping search result pages.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• bestes 3y ago
  Cancelled. I subscribe through Apple and I don’t even see the ad-free option. Might reconsider if it appears, but ads are a deal-breaker for me.
• nyjah 3y ago
  This is such a bummer. Why does everything get worse? I actually really enjoy prime for movies and specifically for foreign movies. I can’t stand all the freevee crap they have been forcing down our throats too. They pack a record amount of commercials into those movies and it’s all clunky when you pause and go back, or need to fast forward or rewind. Just wish there was better ways to get rid of the freevee crap, but if 2.99 gets rid of those ads too, I might be inclined to upgrade. I know it wil just be the stuff that has no ads now tho.
  • gretch 3y ago
    > Why does everything get worse? Everything gets worse because it starts off amazingly good, so there’s no where left to go but down. In this case, most ppl had Prime for the shipping, and just got a free video service on top. It gave us a few great shows like, the Boys, Maisel, expanse, and probably a few others I’m forgetting. I for one thank the VCs for all of the subsidized stuff. But now that era is over. I’m definitely not buying this new thing or watching more Amazon shows (obv unless they put out a new show that is worth the ticket price). But it was nice while it lasted
  • aaronbrethorst 3y ago
    They've likely been running Prime Video at a loss in order to drive up engagement, and now their priorities have changed. Relatedly, see how Uber prices have changed over the past few years. https://slate.com/business/2022/05/uber-subsidy-lyft-cheap-rides.html https://slate.com/business/2022/05/uber-subsidy-lyft-cheap-r...
  • asah 3y ago
    "enshittification" happens because wall street demands revenue growth, and eventually companies run out of innovations and optimizations, and have to resort to raising prices.
    • anigbrowl 3y ago
      'enshittifcation' is just the rebranding of vocabulary for promotional purposes. Doctorow is part of the very problem he complains about.
• Rapzid 3y ago
  I hate how even if you pay for no ads shows can have ackward cuts designed around commercial breaks :|
• jpalawaga 3y ago
  Being back in Canada over the holidays, I was shocked to see how much better their streaming catalogues are. I remember historically, some countries have had much better catalogs than others. Incidentally, I think the catalog quality is proportional to the amount of piracy. more lucrative markets have worse catalogues, despite making more money.
• 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  As a bystander, could someone tell me how many of these video platforms get basic usability wrong? Do the programmers not eat their own dog food? If I watch show X to the end, a little prompt will display saying, "Start Next Episode", I then close the viewer. Next day when I click resume series, it will bring me back to the episode that is 99% complete so that I can watch the credits roll. Why is the algorithm to detect end of show so poor? They have already identified I could advance to the next episode. Even better is when I want to re-watch a previously seen episode, and it will return me to the end of the show where I last stopped. I think it is HBO(?) who lacks a "Restart from Beginning" option, forcing you to manually rewind. Or that some platforms do not maintain a, "Continue Watching" video bar in the same consistent location, forcing you to bounce around to locate your show. This one at least seems like an obvious dark pattern to remind you there is other content, so I can at least attribute some thoughtful design to that annoyance.
  • cpeterso 3y ago
    I assume these design decisions are all driven by teams juicing business metrics, at the expense of usability. Need to increase the “number of streams initiated” KPI? Trick people into resuming videos they already watched 99% of. The alternative, that teams simply don’t care or know how to design good user experiences, is too depressing. Another example: both Netflix and Amazon make finding your saved watchlist difficult probably because they want you to watch random other content instead of watching your finite watchlist (and then unsubscribing when you finish everything on your watchlist).
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • StressedDev 3y ago
    This does not happen on Apple TV.
• MCUmaster 3y ago
  Maybe it’s because I use OpenBSD, or something, but I’ve never once gotten Prime Video to work. Every year or so I try it, it doesn’t work, then I remember most shows and movies are garbage and forget streaming video even exists for another year.
  • smabie 3y ago
    Why not just use it on a TV instead?
    • MCUmaster 3y ago
      Turns out I’m just not motivated enough to even bother spending $1 or 1 minute to watch their garbage.
• FredPret 3y ago
  I've been buying movies / seasons on Apple TV. No ads and I "own" it. I read somewhere that if Apple cut me off, they'd have to refund all those purchases. But even better is buying a DVD set and ripping it. What a pain, but at least you never have to make a deal with this particular devil.
  • Cypher 3y ago
    You're better off buying physical. Amazon can and do replace/modify/update the versions of your online media.
  • loloquwowndueo 3y ago
    You “own” it lol. I hope you read the contract and confirmed the “I’ll get my money back” part - because others have done the “sorry, you no longer have access to your purchases and you’re also not getting a refund” trick. I don’t think Apple is beneath that if they can get away with it.
• jrs235 3y ago
  Per their email: An update on Prime Video Dear Prime member, We are writing to you today about an upcoming change to your Prime Video experience. Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This 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. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* that you can sign up for here. Prime is a very compelling value. Prime members enjoy a wide range of shopping, savings, and entertainment benefits, including: More than 300 million items are available with free Prime shipping and tens of millions of the most popular items are available with free Same-Day or One-Day Delivery. Access to exclusive and broad streaming video content (including Prime Video exclusives like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Boys, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Citadel, The Wheel of Time, Reacher, and The Summer I Turned Pretty, as well as blockbuster movies such as Air, Creed III, Dungeons & Dragons, Candy Cane Lane with Eddie Murphy, and exclusive live sports including NFL Thursday Night Football). Access to Prime Video Channels, which provides an unmatched selection of subscription channels like Max, Paramount+ with SHOWTIME, BET+, MGM+, ViX+, Crunchyroll, PBS KIDS, NBA League Pass, MLB.TV, and STARZ—with no extra apps to download, and no cable required. Customers only pay for the ones they want, and can cancel anytime. The ability to use your Prime shopping benefits—like fast, free delivery, a seamless checkout experience, 24/7 live chat support, and hassle-free returns—on online stores beyond Amazon.com with Buy with Prime. Exclusive deals and shopping events like Prime Day. Ad-free listening of 100 million songs and millions of podcast episodes with Amazon Music. Prescription medications as low as $1 per month and fast, free shipping from Amazon Pharmacy. Access to unlimited eligible generic prescription medications for only $5 per month (including free shipping) with RxPass from Amazon Pharmacy. High-quality health care from One Medical for only $9 per month (or $99 annually), with the option to add up to five additional memberships for the family for only $6 per month (or $66 annually) each. Free two-hour Fresh grocery delivery on orders over $100 (and delivery charges between $6.95 to $9.95 for orders less than $100), and in-store savings on select groceries at Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market stores across the U.S. Unlimited photo storage with Amazon Photos. Gaming benefits with Prime Gaming. More than 3,000 books and magazines with Prime Reading. A free, one-year Grubhub+ membership trial valued at $120 per year, offering unlimited $0 delivery fees on orders over $12. And, you can expect additional features and programs added in the future for our Prime members. As mentioned above, no action is required from you. If you wish to sign up for the ad-free option, you can click here. And, as always, if you have questions about your Prime membership, you can manage your account here. Thank you for being a valued member of Amazon Prime. Sincerely, The Amazon Prime team
• dboreham 3y ago
  Hopefully they don't make the dogs breakfast that is Hulu -- there you can have a subscription "without ads" but then they show you adds on some content. There's no logic to determine which content gets ads and which doesn't, nor can you tell if you would be just as well off not subscribing to the no-ads level since you can't tell how many (if any) additional adds that would generate.
  • pests 3y ago
    Hulu has to show ads on a certain few shows due to contractual agreements. Better than not being available, no? If it upsets you, just pretend it doesn't exist.
    • foogazi 3y ago
      > If it upsets you, just pretend it doesn't exist. Solving the world’s problem right here
      • pests 3y ago
        The problem of having Hulu show ads on some shows, when you pay for no ads? Shows you have to voluntarily watch? This is a first world problem if I've ever seen one.
        • whelp_24 3y ago
          Do you not see the problem? "I paid for an electric car but i still have to add gas sometimes". "I paid for a combo but they didn't give me my fries". You paid extra for something they haven't provided
• jjcm 3y ago
  With prices of all streaming crawling upwards, and often multiple services being required to cover the catalog of what you want to watch, purchasing† has become a compelling option again. Realistically, if you're paying for Netflix, Prime, and Disney+, you're looking at a $45/mo bill. With seasons of shows costing around $10-15 to buy, are you better off with streaming? I personally don't watch more than a full season of a show in any given month, and I've just started considering this. One notable benefit - most streaming providers have a larger digital catalog for purchasing than for streaming, meaning you can centralize more. The obvious downside though is at some point the show may just magically disappear from your purchased library, if negotiations between the platform and the creator go south††. I'd love to see some laws in this area where "a purchase is a purchase" to prevent this, but for now it's a risk (albeit one with maritime workarounds). † or license leasing if you're buying digitally †† ie https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6449826?sortBy=best https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6449826?sortBy=best
  • tedunangst 3y ago
    I rarely watch shows on all services at the same time, and it's fairly easy to turn them on and off on demand.
  • rebeccaskinner 3y ago
    I’m back to buying physical media for exactly these reasons. It’s unfortunate that a lot of things aren’t getting physical media releases these days, or are still only getting dvd releases, but even for Blu-ray the quality is far superior to streaming in most cases, and 4K is even better. Since we’ve started migrating to physical media we no longer have to worry about streaming ability, losing our license to a show, or even network outages.
    • 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
      Disney announced they were going to stop selling physical media in Australia. Media companies are salivating at the thought of forever controlling distribution.
• DueDilligence 3y ago
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• HumblyTossed 3y ago
  We still have Netflix and we also have Amazon. We’ve cut back on watching stuff so we’re probably dropping those this year. It’s not worth keeping anything for as little as we watch now.
• wetpaws 3y ago
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• gpderetta 3y ago
  Sub-prime video. Well I guess I'll be saving ~70£ a year once it gets rolled out in UK.
  • helij 3y ago
    Same here.
• cs702 3y ago
  Now that subscriber growth has slown down at most streaming services, the end of the "golden age of TV" is at hand. Welcome to the "bean-counting age of TV," in which streaming services try to milk subscribers for as much as possible without pissing them off too much. Going forward, I'm expecting cheaper content, greater restrictions, higher prices, a proliferation of tiered subscription plans, and pervasive advertisement. Completely predictable, and yet also very disappointing.
  • vl 3y ago
    I think reverse will happen. We’re going to get amazing shows in the next couple years because production cost is going to be so much lower thanks to AI assistance. Then there will be a short era when phone is just instantly will generate custom video on demand for you when you raise the phone. And then societal collapse due to non-viability of current economic structures.
    • mistersquid 3y ago
      > We’re going to get amazing shows in the next couple years because production cost is going to be so much lower thanks to AI assistance. Then there will be a short era when phone is just instantly will generate custom video on demand for you when you raise the phone. And then societal collapse due to non-viability of current economic structures. Either this is master satire, you communicate with the future, the timeline model you’re running coalesced into the Singularity, or all of these simultaneously. Do you by chance have a newsletter?
      • vl 3y ago
        It’s kinda hard to have newsletter in the age of AI-generated content. No, it’s all old school IRL.
  • MarcoZavala 3y ago
    [dead]
• heads 3y ago
  How comparable is $3 a month to the ad revenue they might make from the shows? Apparently Amazon Prime accounts get a median of 300 minutes per week of view time. That’s 20 hours of TV a month with (in the order of) a few hundred ad slots I am paying to not have to watch. Amazon are making a penny per unwatched-ad from me. Contrast with broadcast TV: Good Morning Britain wants £4k for an ad slot in a show that has 500k to 800k viewers so that’s a CPM also in the order of a penny [edit: ahem, £5, not a penny] paid for by the advertiser, for 1000x views. So, even taking into account Amazon’s targeted ads vs broadcast TV ads, they can indeed make a lot more money from withholding ads than if they show them? We could call their bluff. Maybe they don’t have any ads to actually show for which advertisers are willing to pay significant fee. But if the business model is to get consumers to pay Amazon to make the pain go away then they’d probably just show 90 seconds of screaming at the start, middle and end of every episode of The Boys.
  • mdasen 3y ago
    Good Morning Britain is getting around $6.36-10.18 CPM by your numbers (£5-8 per thousand viewers) which seems reasonable. If Amazon stuffed ads the way most American broadcast channels do, they could get around 720 ads in there which would be $4.58-7.33/mo at the ad rates of Good Morning Britain (American broadcast TV has an egregious number of ads). Assuming fewer ads (Hulu and Netflix show about 5 minutes per hour) that would be 200 ad slots worth $1.27-2.04/mo. So, it's likely that Amazon is making a little more from those who pay to skip ads, but it's in the ballpark. Plus, the people advertisers want to reach are the people with the disposable income to pay to skip the ads. They don't want the cheap people who are willing to waste nearly two hours of their life a month to save $3. I think you might have miscalculated the CPM since you've said "that’s a CPM also in the order of a penny." It's on the order of a penny per viewer, but not per thousand viewers. That's probably why you think it's more of a bluff that could be called. It is likely more revenue if you pay to skip ads, but Amazon would probably end up making $2 from you watching ads.
    • heads 3y ago
      Thanks for checking my math and for doing a second run at it. I’ve edited to point out my mistake. It feels like there’s a mismatch but my numbers are pretty hand wavey so I can imagine it could be a lot closer than that.
• tyingq 3y ago
  Meanwhile, the usability of pirate tools is improving. There's a number of "seed box" providers that put a decent management UI on top of the various pieces you need. And ways to see what's trending (or search the catalog) on Prime, Netflix, Max, etc, and add it to your download queue. A hosted service also trades a fair amount of hassle for a few extra dollars a month.
  • insickness 3y ago
    You don't even need a seed box. You can use a debrid service, like realdebrid or alldebrid to upload the magnet, then download from their site. Costs about $3 per month and you won't get a nastygram from your cable company.
    • tyingq 3y ago
      Not so much for the seed box, but the hosted plex (or whatever) server with the various pieces and parts (things like sonarr, radarr, bazaar for subtitles, etc.) The seed box providers tend to offer these also, but I don't know what to call the bundle.
• pedalpete 3y ago
  I just recently signed up for their free trial because I wanted to watch Air, and figured over the holidays, maybe I'd watch something else (I'm not a TV/Movie person). Air was great! I haven't seen a single other thing I'd want to watch. Started a few things, but nothing grabbed my interest. I know most people don't try life without TV, and I used to LOVE TV and movies. But honestly, give yourself a month without, and you just may find that you are filling your time with more interesting things. I actually still wish I had more things to do, but just as a few, pick up an instrument (I play guitar), try art (I paint, would like to sculpt), write, read, exercise, make new friends. Even try spending more time cooking, or meditating. I almost think that staring at a blank wall with your own thoughts can be better than most of what is on TV. Also, remove the physical TV, and layout your house around socializing rather than watching.
  • type0 3y ago
    > I almost think that staring at a blank wall with your own thoughts can be better than most of what is on TV. Maybe it is, but honestly more people need to just go for a walk to clear their minds
    • pedalpete 3y ago
      Yeah, that's probably a more actionable recommendation. :)
    • shiroiuma 3y ago
      Walking is far healthier too. It's the easiest way to get good exercise and improve your body function.
  • pests 3y ago
    Old man yells at clouds.
    • pedalpete 3y ago
      To be fair, the cloud started it. :)
• pierat 3y ago
  Nah, piracy is cheaper and better. I can download whatever I want, in a world wide scope, for free, with no DRM shit. And no ads or other onerous garbage bolted on. And I keep what I download, rather than "stream" (download every time, with no ability to save). So this 'pay more for less'? Nah, y'all pushing me to piracy. And I have NO problems doing it. And no, I'm not going to pay $150/no for streaming crap that I end up with nothing when I cancel. So, yeah. I pirate.
  • RajT88 3y ago
    The streaming companies need to understand that the user-friendliness of piracy is actually something they need to be competing against. Lots of people I knew pirating stuff stopped when Netflix streaming came out.
• jdeibele 3y ago
  We have an Amazon-branded Chase card that gets 2% back on Amazon purchases if you're not a Prime member. There's no annual fee for the card. If you are a Prime member, it's 5% back. $139 is the annual fee for Prime. $139/3% difference = $4633.33 Somewhat to my surprise, we spent about $3700 on Amazon this past year, meaning $139-$111 or Amazon Prime cost us $28.
  • izzydata 3y ago
    That is all by design. Now you are more inclined to buy things exclusively on Amazon to make good use of this percentage back.
    • smabie 3y ago
      I mean yeah obviously. But it still benefits you.
      • mahkeiro 3y ago
        Not if what you buy on Amazon is more expensive. It decease your willingness to find a better deal somewhere else.
  • croutonwagon 3y ago
    I have also seen purchases on this card bump to 6% if you choose the no rush shipping option (which realisitically is the same as standard anyway...)
• Havoc 3y ago
  Prime video is garbage anyway. They’ve already stuffed it full of ads and the UX experience is cratering. Useful things that made it tolerable “free to me” were removed to facilitate ramming the buy & rent stuff down your throat and series seem to get phased out even faster than Netflix which is a feat.
• Blackstrat 3y ago
  Essentially everything Amazon does today costs too much and doesn’t deliver the quality it once did. In my area, Prime delivery usually takes about a week. I live in a large US city. Their book recommendations system has become garbage. Prices are escalating across the board. That is the cost of a monopoly.
  • izzydata 3y ago
    Curious. I canceled prime years ago and everything is still delivered within 1-2 days. I was starting to wonder if they forgot how to make deliveries take longer.
  • bdzr 3y ago
    While we're tossing anecdotes out, Prime in my medium sized city is getting better and better. Almost everything is here within 2 days, and probably 1/4 of purchases arrive within 18 hours.
    • olyjohn 3y ago
      I ditched Prime and always use the slowest, free shipping option when purchasing on Amazon. Everything shows up on time and more often than not, it shows up early. A lot of times within 2 days even. When I had a Prime subscription it was always late, pretty weird.
  • sirsinsalot 3y ago
    Most cities in the UK, prime is next day before 1pm if ordered before midnight.
• woodruffw 3y ago
  This seems to be the sad reality of many paid services: paying is not a guarantee of freedom from advertisement, only a temporary respite. Being a paying customer is a very juicy datapoint, one that every one of these streaming companies eventually decides to capitalize on.
  • shiroiuma 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • avalys 3y ago
      You don’t have to use any of these services! There is plenty of stuff to do for entertainment that is not TV. Sometimes people act on here as if mass-market TV and movies are, like, a basic human right or something. And presume they’re entitled to do whatever is necessary to get access to it. Go read a book!
      • woodruffw 3y ago
        I think the point is not that people have to use these services (this is obvious, I think), but instead that these services have no essential economic incentive to not walk back benefits that subscribers were previously paying for. (This is true in all kind of market segments, but it’s especially perverse in online services: bandwidth and storage get cheaper each year, so why are we walking the hedonic treadmill on paying not to be advertised to?)
  • ants_everywhere 3y ago
    You end up paying in three ways: (1) money (subscription fees), (2) data (you're forced to log in and allow tracking), and (3) the decrease in attention/focus caused by advertising. All three prices can be ratcheted up over time mostly independently of each other. Price increases in (2) and (3) are largely invisible to the user.
    • jdewerd 3y ago
• sys_64738 3y ago
  I thought we already paid for Amazon Prime Video via our Amazon Prime memberships?
  • linsomniac 3y ago
    We do. This announcement can also be seen as: Amazon Prime price increase of $40/year, with a discounted option that includes advertisements and is $40/year less.
• aydyn 3y ago
  ??? They already all show ads
  • Vaslo 3y ago
    Agreed here, my wife was showing me shows with commercials months ago. How is this different?
    • Nathanba 3y ago
      These companies think that showing ads for their own products isn't an ad
  • glitchc 3y ago
    Currently those commercials are restricted to Amazon original productions. First they'll expand those to other content providers, following that will be major brands (Nike, Coke), and finally we'll have Shamwow and other Ronco products advertised on niche content.
    • Tao3300 3y ago
      Hey it's Vince with Shamwow! (Skip in 1320 seconds)
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  > No action is required from you Thank goodness! I couldn't opt-into seeing ads fast enough! /s
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• neilv 3y ago
  1. I absolutely will not watch videos with commercial breaks. 2. The Prime shipping logo on an item no longer necessarily means 2-day, but frequently means whenever convenient for Amazon. 3. Anecdotally, customer service changes since Bezos handed over the reins have seemed mixed (some bad, some good). Looks like I'm going to cancel my 14.99/month Prime membership, and return to Netflix. Which will also make purchases at Amazon and WFM less attractive. Edit: I just canceled Amazon Prime. I figured that canceling was more meaningful than merely mumbling on the Internet that I might.
• matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Never fails. They just can't resist, can they? Never listen to anyone who tells you some service will never have ads just because you pay for it.
• oidar 3y ago
  Fantastic. I can't wait to have advertisements for cheap knockoffs on my Amazon Primes shows and my Alexa devices./s
• linsomniac 3y ago
  I had been on the fence about renewing my decade+ long Prime membership in a couple weeks. The only thing that was seriously tempting me to keep it was Prime Video. I have mixed feelings already about Prime Video, as a watching experience I find it quite annoying because I'll find a movie I'd like to watch only to find I have to pay another $5 to watch it. With the other services, I know if a movie comes up on the display, I can watch it without further cost. I'm fairly sensitive to adverts, I really don't like seeing them, largely because I've isolated myself from them. The fewer you see, the more unsettling they are, the blatant attractive factor of them, do.not.want. And anther $40/yr is too much. Apparently, dropping Prime with the shopping really does not impact the speed of delivery or cost. I'm already often selecting delayed delivery. With the increased prices, it's hard to justify the $140/yr.
  • notatoad 3y ago
    The prime video experience is just incredibly bad. To the point where even though I pay for prime, I pirate the shows I want to watch instead of watching them in the prime app on my tv.
  • beej71 3y ago
    I was in the same boat. If I hadn't already cancelled, this would have definitely pushed me over the edge. "This deal is getting worse all the time." --Lando talking about his Prime membership
    • seesaw 3y ago
      I have had prime for over 10 years. I think this would push me to cancel it. I think I would also think more before buying if I cancel Prime. We have also found Temu a lot better than Amazon these days. So this is a blessing in disguise.
      • QuantumGood 3y ago
        Better in what ways? (Not my experience with Temu vs Amazon.)
  • 3y ago
• irajdeep 3y ago
  In the end, we all just re-invented good old TV!
  • glitchc 3y ago
    Surprised? I'm not. Given the history of cable, this was an inevitable outcome. Prime Video also looks very much like plain on cable nowadays, with a subacription only entitling one to basic channels. The rest all cost extra.
    • irajdeep 3y ago
      Not surprised at all, maybe mildly disappointed.
  • standardUser 3y ago
    You may be mis-remembering old TV. A tiny number of companies produced a narrow range of programming and if you missed an episode, tough shit. Maybe you'd get a chance to see it in reruns someday if you were lucky. People would actually go out of their way to be home at certain times on certain days to catch the show they liked and were invested in. And of course all of this came with a 2:1 ratio of show to advertisement. And then there was the religiously-dominated abomination that was standards and practices...
    • cwillu 3y ago
      > Maybe you'd get a chance to see it in reruns someday if you were lucky. We're starting to come back to this from the long way around, though: I've had several shows and movies I wanted to watch, that I knew I used to be able to watch, which are no longer available on the service that I watched them.
      • d3w4s9 3y ago
        And those "you need to start watching the movie within 5 days after renting it and must finish within 2 days". Might as well bring those DVD rentals back.
• kitsune_ 3y ago
  I'm paying for YouTube Premium and I fully expect them to do the same thing once they've squeezed the lemon dry and need to find more money in this perverse game of rentier capitalism.
  • xmprt 3y ago
    Step 0: Have a crappy ad ridden platform Step 1: Create an ad free "premium" experience for a price Step 2: Raise prices Step 3: Create a cheaper tier which is "ad supported"
    • salad-tycoon 3y ago
      But are any of the steps: profit? Serious question for those in the know.
  • beAbU 3y ago
    Ut premium is already rotten with ads. Every goddamn popular video is either brought to you by nordvpn, ridge wallet or a goddamn ballsack shaver. It's sickening tbh. I've gotten really good at tapping the skip-forward-10-seconds button a couple of times whenever the ad comes up. The only creator where I don't do that is Acerola, because he puts a video of him playing with his cat in a pip view during his ad. I can zone out for the ad and enjoy the cat video instead. Win-win
    • wkat4242 3y ago
      Haha yes! This is the problem with YouTube premium. It's not ad free at all :( I'm so glad people have made sponsorblock
    • TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
      Try out Sponsorblock [0]. It skips sponsored content in YouTube videos. [0] https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/
      • beAbU 3y ago
• dissident_coder 3y ago
  Recently started trialing Walmart Delivery Pass to get next day delivery from local stores. Actually pretty convenient to get my fresh produce, meat, dairy, etc… delivered along with whatever stuff I’d normally order from Amazon with Prime. I was planning on keeping prime for video but the free shipping is less valuable to me now, but if they’re gonna make the service worse and charge me more for what I had before then I’m just gonna cancel.
  • prettyStandard 3y ago
    Not to rush to Walmarts aid... Their Walmart+ subscription also comes with Paramount Plus. I'm planning: - on cancelling Netflix - Canceling Amazon Prime, slower shipping frequently gives you digital dollars you can use to buy TV shows and music - Keep using Walmart Plus I need my groceries, and I don't want to do the shopping. They will pickup about just about anything in the store. I haven't tested the upper limit for size or weight though. Paramount Plus isn't that great but I don't really want to spend my life watching TV. I just sometimes need a distraction.
    • wkat4242 3y ago
      Uh I think those digital dollars only show up if you choose slow shipping while you have prime. Just saying.
    • chipt4 3y ago
      FWIW, I've gotten ~~50lb~~ 46lb (grumble) bags of dog food delivered with my Walmart+ order. Haven't seen anything about a weight limit (though I probably wouldn't ask one of the poor contracted delivery people to bring me something huge, like a large piece of flat pack furniture, for example) Edit: imagine that "50lb" has a strikethrough
  • spiderice 3y ago
    Are you pressured to tip with Walmart same day though? That’s why I stopped using DoorDash. I hate how expensive tipping makes everything, but I don’t want to be a jerk and not tip when the driver is underpaid.. so I just stopped using it.
• suyash 3y ago
  Easy solution - can someone create or add to the existing ad blocker to work on Amazon Prime ads as well please?
  • jjtheblunt 3y ago
    Can you do that?
  • bugglebeetle 3y ago
    This already works with uBlock Origin and their FreeVee stuff, so I don’t see why not.
    • wkat4242 3y ago
      Yeah but what about a smart TV or android stick?
      • dr_kiszonka 3y ago
        I remember reading that you could block ads on smart TVs using pi-hole, but I don't know whether it covers all streaming services.
        • wkat4242 3y ago
          Oh I tried this but it doesn't work at all. I get ads in the interface (Fire TV) and in the streaming services. I think it's using DoH so it can't be blocked this way.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• elzbardico 3y ago
  Cable TV once had the same allure: Freedom from ads. It was even hard to explain kids 10 years ago, at a time when kids still watched cable, that there was once a time when cable TV didn't have ads.
  • dragonwriter 3y ago
    > It was even hard to explain kids 10 years ago, at a time when kids still watched cable, that there was once a time when cable TV didn't have ads. One thing that may have made this difficult is that, in fact, there was never a time when cable didn't have ads. It was invented to deliver standard (advertising laden) TV to places geographically out-of-reach of broadcast, and basic cable always was a mix of broadcast stations and additional ad-laden stations. Premium cable channels didn't tend to have advertising except for their own (or shared corporate parent) programming, but those were charged additionally on top of basic cable. As someone who had cable since the mid-1980s, its been really weird to see this recent invention of a lost past where cable existed but was ad-free.
    • elzbardico 3y ago
      Where I lived the only reason to have cable was to watch premium channels. OTA worked perfectly fine for everything else. So, probably you're right on your perception, but it doesn't invalidate my point of view and of other people who clearly remember a time where you did have ad-free television in Cable, because we only cared for the premium channels.
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        “There was a time cable had no ads” and “there was a time you could spend additional money to buy separate ad-free channels on top of dozens of relayed broadcast channels and dozens to hundreds of basic cable channels, all with ads, on cable” are... very different claims. And using the latter to decry an evolving norm of it being possible to spend additional money to get the entire service ad-free on top of the basic cost of an (ad-supported) streaming service is... odd.
• more_corn 3y ago
  I quit prime over a year ago and I don’t miss it. Walmart shipping is actually faster in my area. I highly encourage every single person to drop prime. Adding advertising to streaming will undo all of the gains we’ve made by shifting to streaming. If one platform does it and everyone quits nobody else will. If everyone stays every other platform will follow suit.
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    We've had accepting on it in Spain for about 2 years now sadly :( But I mainly have it for the rapid shipping anyway. Their catalog is pretty useless so I hardly watch it.
  • rqtwteye 3y ago
    " If everyone stays every other platform will follow suit" I bet this will happen.
    • LesZedCB 3y ago
      this is why Amazon is doing it. netflix led the way and their membership overall stayed.
• binkHN 3y ago
  I think this qualifies for the enshittification of everything.
  • tacheiordache 3y ago
    Think of the bright side, people will slowly wake from frog-boiling and will start consuming less. It's also possible the great attention deficit will come to an end as more and more people will simply drop off these platforms realizing it's not worth their money. Then they'll rediscover what they had previously lost
    • antihipocrat 3y ago
      That future sounds great, though it's possible that consumption will remain the same, but a sizeable portion shifted to ad-free alternatives (Ahoy, me Hartie's!)
    • LesZedCB 3y ago
      sadly instead of consuming less it seems amazon is losing its monopoly status to online stores like Temu instead which direct ship from producing countries to the US under the $800 import tax limit making it comically cheap...
  • pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Established technology being constantly moulded to be slightly worse so billionaires can be slightly richer when they already have more than they could ever usefully spend ... ah, the crowning glory of capitalism! Imagine a world in which many of the most intelligent minds were not being exploited to brainwash us into wanting things we don't need to try and ensure we can only find satisfaction by overusing resources that the planet cannot afford.
• cdbyr 3y ago
  This seems like short-run thinking winning. I don’t want to have to think about if companies I interact with are going to slowly diminish the product. This sort of thing undermines that - it’s a rare good thing for companies to be trustable, and a bummer when it doesn’t hold.
• bryanmgreen 3y ago
  How did paid channels like HBO and Showtime make their ad-free model work in the regular TV era?
  • lemonberry 3y ago
    We paid for it. Greed had yet to reach the levels we see today. Not to mention the disparity between the wealthy and the average person we are currently living with.
    • HDThoreaun 3y ago
      You’re claiming that people used to be less greedy?
      • spiderice 3y ago
        They hadn’t yet figured out how to adapt their greed to the new streaming era.
      • lemonberry 3y ago
        Yes. Technology and our knowledge of the world allows for an accumulation of wealth, power, control and social status that have never been possible before.
  • maxerickson 3y ago
    They were expensive and had considerably less content. Like 1 or 2 channels with a modest amount of original programming each week.
  • supertrope 3y ago
    They got a cut of the add-on charge and the base cable TV subscription fee.
• andsoitis 3y ago
  This is really just a price increase, given the increasing costs of TV and movie productions (creatives must get paid). Details: Amazon Prime currently costs $14.99 each month or $139 annually. (Prime Video can be subscribed to individually for $8.99/month.) The new charge for ad-free streaming would bring Prime to just under $18, and would push standalone Prime Video to just under $12.
  • throwup238 3y ago
    Hell if it was about creatives getting paid I’d be all for it. But I wasn’t born yesterday and I know that it’s just a cynical ploy to boost some exec’s numbers so they can make their bonus for the fiscal year. We’ve been down this road too many times before.
    • spiderice 3y ago
      > Hell if it was about creatives getting paid I’d be all for it I wouldn’t. They already bring in plenty of money to pay creatives more. Just because they’re too greedy to pay them doesn’t justify upping the price for everyone.
  • mistyvales 3y ago
    Does it say anywhere if the $139 a year package will show ads?
  • tunesmith 3y ago
    I didn't even realize one could subscribe to Prime Video alone. I wonder if it's easy to subscribe for a month at a time like it is with hbo and disney.
    • basiccalendar74 3y ago
      yes, it is.
• more_corn 3y ago
  How about nope?
• rokkitmensch 3y ago
  Torrent system is alive and well. Mega shout out to seedhost.eu for their one-button panel for everything. VLC will even open media over http, so one doesn't even have to mirror it locally from the Netherlands (although I do for the kids content, just to provide them a curated selection).
  • ProjectArcturis 3y ago
    I looked at seedhost, and it looks like a regular host -- what special thing does it do for media?
    • adastra22 3y ago
      It keeps DCMA violation letters from being sent to your ISP.
      • rokkitmensch 3y ago
        heh this but also a fully configured mini http server of your own with buttons to eg install and run transmission's web ui and make the files show up in your little website/Nginx directory host. it's just so gloriously cpanel , you know?!
      • dmix 3y ago
        I've received plenty of those letters but they never do anything about it. Just toss it in the garbage. I'm pretty sure they are just scare tactics the ISPs volunteer to partake in.
        • adastra22 3y ago
          Some ISPs will drop you as a customer after too many.
  • ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    Not just alive and well but massively better. Open source software to do everything from watchlisting movies, downloading them when they are available in the highest quality and just seamless media management. Everything is so much better with piracy.
• mistyvales 3y ago
  So does the $139 yearly package deal INCLUDE ads for Prime content (movies/shows) or will that be ad-free?
  • mixdup 3y ago
    includes ads. If you want ad-free Prime Video you have to pay an additional $3/month on top of your basic Prime subscription
    • mistyvales 3y ago
      I don't see anyone mentioning that anywhere, but that would be annoying.
      • mixdup 3y ago
        It's implied since there's no such thing as free ad supported Amazon Prime Video. It's part of the paid Amazon Prime service. You have to then pay extra on top of your yearly Prime subscription to remove ads.
• Animats 3y ago
  I'm glad I never bought Prime. Almost everything on Amazon has free shipping. You have to fight through dark patterns four times to get to it, but it's there. Free shipping doesn't take much longer than regular shipping, anyway. I've been using Amazon less since they sent me counterfeit vitamins. I'll usually order stuff from wherever the drop-shipper gets it from.
• spike021 3y ago
  Between this and many of my Prime "two-day" eligible orders taking up to and occasionally longer than a week these days, I'm thinking it may be time to cancel my Prime subscription.
• pbnjeh 3y ago
  More and more of their offering has been moving to their Freevee ad tier, anyway. And if they run the Prime tier ads like they've been running the Freevee tier ads, for me, that means "forget about it". Freevee ads, last time I could bring myself to try a show on it, are copious, inserted willy-nilly into the show often at very awkward and disruptive moments, with no forewarning... AND, the quality of the ads and their copy/content is crap. Not just lots of very disruptive ads, but offensive ones. Louis Rossman has a recent YouTube video on the severely declining quality of the physical products you find on (U.S.) Amazon. It really helped crystallize for me in my own mind what's been happening there. He can't find a decent electrical butt joint to, well, as you see from his demonstration, potentially save his life (versus the Chinese crap e.g. starting a fire that takes it). This move is just one more step -- far down the road -- towards Amazon becoming an outright sewer. I'm supposed to pay $130 ($150?...) a year, for THIS?! (And by the way, 2 day delivery is a farce now. A few things are quicker, and many are... the opposite.) Anyway, I'm looking at a set of "Magnum PI" DVD's I just picked up used, because Freevee has had the streaming rights bound up for the last year or a bit more, and I literally cannot watch the show together with their ads. I'll take the downgrade in image quality over putting up with them. Oh, and if you want Magnum on Blu-ray? You have to pony up the better part of $200 for one of the remaining European box sets. Then purchase a "gray" modded Blu-ray player. Or rip them. Or... that other thing. F--- the entire "entertainment industry". Once it transitions from creativity to the intellectual property portion of its function, it's just a monster. P.S. Although I don't regularly survey all the offerings, the only ad-based streaming whose ad delivery I've been able to tolerate is Tubi. They've been increasing the quantity of ads -- sigh -- but you still get a 10 second warning, and the ads I see largely I do not find comparatively offensive. (And those shite/exploitative online gambling ads seem to be in decline -- yay!) Plus, Tubi overall has a comparable if not better catalog, these days. So maybe I'll just tell Amazon to stuff it. If I'm going to have ads, Tubi does that better, anyway. (Although I do hate making Fox, now its owner, any money, even such indirect, advertising-based money.)
  • ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    Because Amazon as a whole is a failing business now. I know it sounds shocking when I say it but at a certain scale everything breaks down and nothing works anymore. The same with Google and Facebook. There is a reason Google can't do AI and Facebook can't launch hardware. It is a natural evolutionary process in the lifespan of a business organism. This is startup opportunity and where the next companies are made. Companies like Valve are the only exception because they have hacked this natural law.
• Lamad1234 3y ago
  [dead]
• epgui 3y ago
  The day this starts is the day I stop using the service.
• preommr 3y ago
  How else are they supposed to fund projects like "The rings of power" for a billion dollars?
  • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    I was willing to give them my hard-earned $$ when they were running The Expanse. But, yeah, Rings of Power is complete dreck. Nice looking dreck, but dreck. Just cancelled Prime.
    • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
      And they forced The Expanse to finish at least a season early, with a real Game of Thrones style accelerated and abrupt ending that felt hollow and "victory undeserved" in comparison to how small wins were very hard earned for the rest of the fantastic series.
• Lamad1234 3y ago
  [dead]
• isaacremuant 3y ago
  I'm never using a service with ads. Ever. If I pay for it, it shouldn't have ads. I have prime but not for prime video because I practically never use it. This means I'll use it less and I'll consider the value of the prime offering worse than before.
• DarkByte 3y ago
  I will be unsubscribing once this is live.
• nothercastle 3y ago
  I guess I need to finish expanse season 3 at least. Nothing else really worth watching on it anyway. Meh to power rings, and NFL Thursday is over anyway by Jan. What else do they have? The boys?
  • randallsquared 3y ago
    Reacher. Genuinely much better than the movie Reacher.
    • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
      I quite enjoyed the first Reacher movie, so much so that the sequel was unexpectedly, jarringly bad. Might give the series a quick squizz.
      • randallsquared 3y ago
        I will say that the second season cares less about social plausibility, if that matters for you. But then, the books were quite random about that, too, partly due to Lee Child never having been to the US when he started writing about someone roaming about the US. :)
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• replwoacause 3y ago
  Happy to quit this just like I did Netflix
  • nullfield 3y ago
    The only thing that has saved Netflix, kinda, so far is that they left the "current" plan alone (though they still throw in their "occasional" small price hikes) and added a new tier with ads. Which they didn't try hard at all to get anyone to switch to. This other direction, of "oh, that was nice, we're taking it, and you can pay more to have it back" has a different psychological feel to it. Amazon seems to think that it'll go over fine; time will tell.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• mynameisnoone 3y ago
  No big loss. There's been nothing original and good on PV for 2 years. It's basically Amazon's streaming nearly content-free shovelware service and overpriced Blockbuster with zero investment. Sorry, but I refuse to watch shit without ads, or now with it.
• sailfast 3y ago
  I would be angry about this but there isn’t very much on Prime anyway. That said, I can’t say I’ll ever buy their hardware again.
• bamboozled 3y ago
  Cool, so we’re back to commercial television , what’s next programming ?
• bamboozled 3y ago
  Cool, so we’re back to commercial television , what’s next programming? I mean I’m sure there is more money in it. Sponsored content etc.
• ggfdhhvvg 3y ago
  [flagged]
• interestica 3y ago
  Amazon always seemed uniquely positioned to do product-placement type ads for any show. They have demonstrated the basics with their “x-ray” overlays for shows and it’s not a big leap for them to use it as gateway for the online store. It currently displays information on actors in the specific scenes on screen. Link to albums featured in the scene? Fashion? Small appliances shown in the protagonist’s kitchen? (To be clear, I hate this. But it seems inevitable)
• lulznews 3y ago
  Nice customer obsession.
• nmridul 3y ago
  Amazon needs something sticky included in prime. An email or very generous photo storage. This is what keeps many people stuck with Gmail and outlook. Else amazon is soon going to see huge drop in prime subscribers. From the comments here, looks like fast shipping and streaming are not sticky enough for most people.
  • jyap 3y ago
    Prime does give unlimited photo storage (not videos). Probably the one perk keeping me locked in.
    • bombcar 3y ago
      Shutterfly does too, if you use them.
  • aimor 3y ago
    They saw a year over year drop in Prime subscribers in Q1 2023. I completely agree, but that "sticky" thing could also be improving the Prime shopping experience. I got sick of seeing things on Amazon listed for one price without Prime shipping and a higher price with Prime shipping.
  • mr_machine 3y ago
    Fast shipping and streaming were plenty sticky for me. I'm aware that Prime offers various other benefits, but I never cared about them at all. I paid for Prime for very many years and considered it a good value. But their shipping has slowed considerably, and I'm in the no-ads-ever club, so they've lost me as a customer.
• agnosticmantis 3y ago
  My mind was blown recently discovering Tubi with so many great movies (many of them classics and highly rated) for free (with occasional ads, of course) and I regret having paid for Netflix and other services in the past.
  • aimor 3y ago
    I tried Tubi about a year ago and kind of love it. I don't like the ads (it's very similar to TV). But how great it is to have a streaming service with movies I actually want to watch! I've been catching up on all kinds of movies, big and small, having a great time, and it's 'free'. It still suffers from the "they had this movie last month and now it's gone" problem (my watch lists on Hulu and Netflix are useless because 100% of the movies are no longer available). But for now Tubi has not abandoned old movies in favor of "Tubi Originals" like Netflix and Hulu have done. As an aside, the ad format (forced ~2 minutes of ads every ~20 minutes) is way more tolerable than something like YouTube (Skip button roulette every ~5 minutes). I can mute the TV, use the bathroom, make a snack, just like the good old days.
• ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  I hope this backfires as did Google's crackdown on YouTube ad-blockers. I already have a VPN and BitTorrent trackers I can rely on. I'm willing to (and do) pay for content. But I will not pay to watch ads. Amazon are scumbags who steal from small enterprises anyway; I almost welcome this motivation to deny them more of my money.
  • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    I'm on your side of the argument, but I don't know whether you're correct in saying that Google's crackdown on YouTube ad-blockers has backfired. Those of us who know how to, and are willing to spend the time to, get around the current blocks are a comparatively small, potentially trivial, percentage of the YouTube viewing public. And it'll take time for us to implement these changes for friends and family, during which time YouTube's ad revenue and subscription revenue will undoubtedly increase.
    • ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      Reportedly a lot more people became aware of ad-blockers than ever would have without Google's hissy fit. How much follow-through and ad-blocker installation that translated to, I have no idea. But it's fun to mock Google anyway. But... I am one person Google drove away. I finally installed an alternative YouTube application simply because Google introduced never-ending ads that must be manually canceled every few minutes. I was OK with watching normal, TV-style ads. But Google crossed the line by basically halting playback of a program every few minutes and forcing you to herd it along over and over and over. I can't do that while I'm cooking.
      • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
        > Reportedly a lot more people became aware of ad-blockers than ever would have without Google's hissy fit. Happy for this to be true
• insane_dreamer 3y ago
  I am altering the deal; pray I do not alter it any further. - Lord Bezos
• rckt 3y ago
  It was simple not so long ago. You either buy stuff or pirate it. Then everything moved to the subscription model. You don’t own what you’ve bought anymore. And now you have to watch ads while being a paying customer. It feels like pirating was a better option all this time. The only “store” I really use nowadays is Bandcamp.
  • UncleOxidant 3y ago
    > The only “store” I really use nowadays is Bandcamp. And now that Bandcamp has been bought out it's only a matter of time before the experience there becomes crappy as well.
  • fortyseven 3y ago
    Steam has been pretty good to me over the years for gaming. It took a long time to build up trust to buy digital-only copies of games, but they've been reliable. Even with my trust in that delivery method losing a lot of it's allure lately, it's one of the few digital storefronts I feel any kind of trust in. And then there's GOG, which I have less experience with, but they were good, too, while I used 'em. They don't offer a Proton/WINE compatibility layer for Linux like Steam does, so I kind of stopped getting stuff there once I switched away from Windows a couple years ago. (Ironically, Linux drove me away from a DRM-free storefront, but here we are.)
    • matejdro 3y ago
      You can get Lutris: It's an open source launcher that you login into with GOG account and it will download the games and wrap them with Wine, similar to Steam. https://lutris.net/ https://lutris.net/
• diegs 3y ago
  I wish I could pay money to hide amazon ads on our echo show devices and not auto-opt-in to each new "experience" pane they add. They let you do it for Kindle ads and now for Prime, maybe it'd be a nice cash injection for the faltering Alexa org? Really, I just want our smart displays (which I paid real money for) to show our family photos and do smart home things. It's exhausting to repeatedly have to open up the settings panel and uncheck whichever new screens/"experiences" they've added each time they start popping up. There are dozens at this point--talk about shipping your org chart! Hopefully Matter will mature at some point and Apple will ship some smart displays of their own, and then we can toss our Alexas in the bin.
  • SparkyMcUnicorn 3y ago
    Google's displays are fairly decent. No ads, can cast Home Assistant dashboards onto them (with functional touch), and the 1st gen hubs sell for around ~$30 and 2nd gen around ~$50.
    • diegs 3y ago
      Yeah, they are generally better but Ring and Alexa Skills are better than their Google counterparts (at least the last time I checked). I actually have a few old Nest hubs sitting in the basement…
      • SparkyMcUnicorn 3y ago
        I rely on HA pretty heavily for everything, and that covers anything I'd want out of Alexa and more.
  • midasz 3y ago
    How do they inject the ads? It might be worth running your own little dns like adguard home or pi hole (or paying for nextdns)
    • diegs 3y ago
      Sadly they’re just part of the app. I run adblocking DNS on my home network, but it doesn’t make a difference with this.
• jerpint 3y ago
  Yesterday I wanted to watch a show, which was available on prime. When trying to view it, I had to pay an extra 5.99$ for another subscription to watch, which I paid. I then got served adds every 10 minutes during my show. Streaming services are broken
• mwambua 3y ago
  Will this affect shows/movies that have been purchased on Amazon?
• etempleton 3y ago
  I used to love Amazon as a service, despite their monopolistic practices, but I find myself avoiding using Amazon more and more because of the slow erosion of service quality over the last few years. I can handle the price increase of Prime, but I no longer feel I get the same quality service. A few things I have noticed: 1. I see less 1 day shipping on items than a few years ago. 2. My subscribe and save items are over priced and usually out of stock 3.Twitch has a lot of ads 4.Amazon Prime will now have ads 5. Brand safety - too many scam sellers or low priced untested junk sellers on Amazon. Apparel is particularly bad. A lot of knock offs.
  • jimbob45 3y ago
    You say that but everyone in my family gets actively angry when they have to buy something from a non-Amazon storefront. I switched shoe brands from Nike because I was so mad they don’t sell on Amazon directly anymore.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• rompledorph 3y ago
  “We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you,…” Sounds like there will be targeted ads tailored for the viewer
• bilalq 3y ago
  With these quality degradations from streaming providers and content removal of "purchased" items due to licensing changes, I feel like we're going to see piracy make a comeback. I wish there was an easy way to digitize large libraries of physical media. Doing it manually is way too much of a chore to bother.
• ChicagoDave 3y ago
  I had thought to just keep paying, but the value isn’t there anymore. Last mile delivery is ubiquitous. I don’t use any of the other “benefits”. I’ve purchased shows and movies, but mostly don’t care. We’ve seen everything anyway. I’m down to Hulu+Disney, Max (via AT&T), and AppleTV+. Everything else is cancelled.
• shartshooter 3y ago
  Unfortunately, too many people in America are just indifferent to sacrificing their attention to ads. I see it in my parents/siblings when I visit. An ad that would have me immediately grasping a remote, doesn't even make them budget. They watch it, consider it, and move on. All these companies have figured out that they can boil the frog and not enough people make enough of a stink for them to care. So they'll keep cramming ads down everyone's throats, because they've got a monopoly on the content.
  • sentientslug 3y ago
    Very weird that you consider this an American problem. To me it’s a human problem.
    • shartshooter 3y ago
      Agreed, having mostly lived only in America, it's tough for me to comment on other cultures, though I assume they're similar in that respect.
  • fortyseven 3y ago
    I think we've largely forgotten what live over-the-air television was like for quite a few decades: TV shows and movies split up by blocks of 5-6 30 second ads, including ads for other shows later in the week. We'd either sit through them, bored, or find something else to do. (Or pause recording on the VCR. Heh.) Hell, they'd even show a bumper with the title of the show sometimes just to break up the large chunk of ads. Once we got a taste of what it was like to NOT have ads, and have more control over what/when we watch... boy did they screw themselves. I can't enjoy OTA television anymore. Both the nearly nonstop ads, and the "appointment television" necessity if you don't have a DVR. But at least on OTA television, the ads at least had some kind of quality control (at least back in the day). All the ads (or 'sponsored content') I see on YouTube and friends are some of the most disgusting garbage. And now ATSC 3.0 is introducing paid paywalls for BROADCAST TELEVISION. So even OTA television is about to pass the enshitification red line. Add in the decline of physical media sales, and... well, there's some dark days ahead, and you can thank shortsighted greed for it.
• bonestamp2 3y ago
  I wish I could get a discount on prime if I removed prime video.
• dbg31415 3y ago
  I will continue to pay for Prime and Netflix and Disney but I will also just continue to pirate all the content I want and not watch it through the services. They are all getting so junky lately. The quality of content across the board has gone way down.
• fsckboy 3y ago
  >Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements. people, it's 3 bucks a month extra to get rid of ads. I hate Amazon for many reasons, but the $3 is not going to be the deal breaker
  • koolba 3y ago
    > people, it's 3 bucks a month extra to get rid of ads. It’s $3/month to continue a level of service you were already receiving. If this were a new ad-supported product with $3/month discount it wouldn’t feel as dirty.
  • sentientslug 3y ago
    Okay, until they bring ads to that tier and ask you to pay $3 more to avoid ads again….. Do you really not see why this is a problem? It’s not about the $3 it’s about paying for a service and still being advertised to.
  • maronato 3y ago
    “I’m altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” - Amazon
• AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  Since Amazon Prime Video got serious about region locking and eliminated essentially everything except videos they produced, I pretty much gave up on the service anyway. Amazon use to be a legitimate competitor, but now, Netflix is a more obvious choice than ever.
• kelnos 3y ago
  I've more or less given up on the streaming services again. It's a shame, because in the early era of streaming it was actually great: affordable prices, decent quality, good app experience (Netflix at least), and low fragmentation. But nowadays if I want to watch everything I care to watch, I have to subscribe to at least five different services, and the pricing keeps going up, sometimes multiple times per year. They're trying to wring more and more money out of us with more payment tiers, and I refuse to watch ads, so I'll always be paying mire for the ad-free tier. UX has suffered, and apps are buggy and don't work right at the most frustrating times. Fortunately I rarely use Prime Video for anything; I mainly subscribe to Prime for the free quick shipping. I've had it more or less since they first introduced it, and get value out of it just for the shipping. Overall I guess I'm fairly disillusioned with Amazon, especially with their product counterfeiting issues, so there are certain classes of things I'll never buy there. And I'm of course uncomfortable with how they treat their warehouse workers and delivery drivers.
  • maronato 3y ago
    In Boston I’ve been getting free 2 day shipping without prime. A lot of times it arrives in just one day. Prime used to be a good deal. Now, unless you are neck deep in the amazon ecosystem, it’s just a bundle of lesser services that you’ll never use, and the ones you use keep getting downgraded
• stjohnswarts 3y ago
  they've been introducing it in some things over time. I think this may be my exit call. I've been using it less over time, I usually order enough to get the free shipping, etc, so ditching prime might be the best option as hint, if enough people do it.
• SubiculumCode 3y ago
  cable used to not have ads. dropping prime mow.
• shoulderfake 3y ago
  [dead]
• eur0pa 3y ago
  Piracy is alive and well, has been since the late 90s and early 00s. Never seen an ad in my life.
  • InCityDreams 3y ago
    I recently gave up on youtube because of the ads. I do follow google podcasts and the ads there are so inoffensive I really don't mind them. But I, too, have returned to piracy.
• dingi 3y ago
  Well, you can always turn to good ol' piracy. Nobody has to pay for dozen or so streaming services ever. And now you want to shove ads down the throat too. No thanks. reply
• emrah 3y ago
  Many titles I end up watching are on Freevee anyway
• pshirshov 3y ago
  Well, Netflix increased the subscription price, I dropped it. If I need something on a rare occasion, I can always "buy" their content on torrents. Regrading Prime - I will continue paying for the premium delivery as long as it lasts, though I would prefer to watch Prime Video ad-free on torrents. 98% of the content is crap anyways.
• apapapa 3y ago
  Https://sunxdcc.com Unlike torrent, you dont even need a VPN for downloads
• PeterStuer 3y ago
  Prime Video has near 0 value in Europe, because they have almost no content. The only reason it 'lives' imho is that it is bundled with Prime delivery. I have noticed that I no longer order much from Amazon because of the rampant fake product problem that arised from SKU pooling. I just went to my account settings and turned on the 'warn me 3 days before renewing'. If they go true with these adds over here, it will be the straw that broke the camel's back for me. And to be fair, unless I see some huge video catalog improvement on some change in SKU pooling so I can trust buying again, they loose my sub anyways.
  • nullfield 3y ago
    By SKU pooling do you mean Amazon consolidating things that they think/claim are the same SKU, or something else? I specifically go out of the way to get "sold-from/shipped-by Amazon", but I don't know if that's enough to save me...
    • PeterStuer 3y ago
      Yes, they disconnected the seller from their product pool, so you can no longer 'trust' the seller as AFAIK they have no control over which product from the SKU pool gets shipped to you. Once a scammer gets subpar/fake products into the SKU pool, everyone is screwed as the connection between delivery into the warehouse and selling out of the warehouse pool is completely dark. This creates a race to the bottom condition.
• instagib 3y ago
  Will paying the fee also remove the pre-roll advertisements that are already in place?
• amir734jj 3y ago
  Prime is already expensive. The only show I watch on Prime is Invincible because I love the comic book. We have to show these companies that it's not right to include ads if you pay $140/year. I will be canceling my Prime. I am very disappointed.
• getlawgdon 3y ago
  This is pure greed. I got their email notice about this. I tried to complain, but there was nobody to reach, no impact I could make. It's just one massive, deaf monolith. I realize more than ever that this consumer isolationism is crazy and I certainly dont need to fund it! Cancelling Prime today.
  • thiht 3y ago
    You « reach » by canceling your subscription. No need for anything more really. That’s what I did a few month ago when I noticed Prime was way more expensive than I remembered, and couldn’t justify it anymore. I used to love Prime Video but every single thing I want to watch needs an additional few bucks nowadays, so no thanks.
• okr 3y ago
  What must i hear, a whiney sound from so called "hackers", who make thousands of dollars each month, let prime run for years, and now, when adding a few extra dollars to continue to have free shipping and ads free video seems like necessity, well, now they are upset! Ridiculous. And sipping their next Latte for 10 bucks on their way to work. :)) Oh wait, going to work, thats is now out of the question and very unsettling too.
• BeefDinnerPurge 3y ago
  Mid-show ads is more than enough to cancel Prime. Mid-video ads on youtube made me all but stop watching it on mobile. But I'll probably wade my way through S4 of The Boys and S2 of Invincible before doing so since they're both coming up in the near future. But this 100% explains the 2/4 premiere date for the last of Invincible episodes. Same day and overnight delivery are something I never needed or wanted. 2-day delivery was nice, but now it's random. Amazon prices are no longer all but guaranteed to be competitive and buying directly from the manufacturer is often the same or lower price. Prime(sic) goeth before the fall I guess.