I’d seen rumours online but got the email this morning.
EDIT: seems like there won’t be ads for everyone straight away.
- Live events, such as sports, and content offered through Amazon Freevee will continue to include advertising. Customers in the Republic of Ireland, Channel Islands, and Isle of Man won’t see ads in their experience at this time.
You don’t actually have to pay Amazon anything. I suggest you consider this.
Exactly.
I canceled my sub when I got the email. I’m going to pirate anything I want to see from them from now on.
Consider: Pirate everything. It’s just a race to the bottom. The average you can charge for an ad tiered service will just continue shifting up as each streaming service gently increases their ad-free prices. If it was ~$15/mo avg before this, now Netflix sees the avg price go to $15.57/mo. If you’re going to increase the price by 57¢ you might as well make it a nice round $1…Then Hulu sees the average go to $16.13 so then they need to increase their prices. So on and so forth until we’re back to paying $60/mo like we did for cable TV.
And here’s the kicker. They’re legally obligated to do this because they could be sued by shareholders for not trying to make more money. And that’s without mentioning that they actually prefer people to watch the ads because they generate more revenue from sponsored advertising. Pirating is ethical and cool. Paying subscription fees to trillion dollar corporations is cringe.
And I just cancelled. Fuck them. This is 1990’s pay TV repeating itself. I’m not playing that part of history again.
I’ve had prime since almost day one. Lately I’ve been trying to reduce my dependency on Amazon which isn’t easy when you’re already paying them in advance for shipping just to keep prime video and a few free games and ebooks. This was the push I needed to finally sever that tie and release myself from their trap. This could be the start of a good thing for a lot of people. Prime has been an effective competition blocking lock-in scheme for too long. It’s end result is it’s ability to keep prices high because they are the sole gatekeeper. Good riddance Amazon.
Yeah, had it for years. They ruined their default Music sub earlier in the year so I got Spotify out of spite instead of upgrading it.
When I heard about this change a few months back I cancelled on the spot.
