Ad-free is still available, but you’ll have to pay extra for it
As we reported last year, Amazon is going to start putting adverts in Prime Video for paying subscribers this year – and that advertising starts later this month on January 29. If you want to keep your ad-free viewing you’ll need to pay extra for it: $2.99 a month in the US and £2.99 per month in the UK. The ad-free option will cover everything but live sports, which will continue to include ads.
Amazon’s email sent last night to subscribers and its previous blog post tries to portray this as a good thing: the ads are coming to make your TV experience better! The introduction of ads « will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. »
But of course it’s not about making your experience better any more than filling your Amazon search results with products from the Shenzen Dangerous Toy and Lawn Mower Company was about making Amazon more useful: like other streaming services, Amazon is finding that streaming is costing more and bringing in less than it hoped.
