Starting Jan. 29, all of Prime Video becomes an ad tier poised to rake in billions of dollars – at the expense of frustrating users.
Amazon’s Prime Video streamer is poised to surpass Netflix in a big way starting this week. No, it’s not in terms of viewership, nor the size of its catalog, or the quality of its originals. It has to do, instead, with both streamer’s launch of an ads business. For Netflix, the uptake on its still relatively new ad-supported subscription tier has been relatively modest thus far, with some 23 million users globally, while Prime Video is about to blow past that in a big way starting Monday.
Amazon’s streamer will essentially flip a switch that makes the entirety of Prime Video an ad tier — and, importantly, the only way to get around it is for the company’s reported 115 million users who don’t want to watch ads to pay a small fee on top of what they’re already paying to stream content like Reacher and The Boys. Netflix, in contrast, decided to offer an all-new, separate, and cheaper ad-supported tier.
Moreover, not only will Prime Video’s ad business immediately take a huge leap past Netflix’s starting on Jan. 29, but how each company got here represents two very different schools of thought when it comes to monetization.
