Amazon Prime Video content to start including ads next year

Honestly, I think what I see next is not just ads, but sponsored content within the content itself. No different than YouTube.

Yet then, then… we can have tiers. There can be more interesting sponsors and advertisements in the pricier subscription tiers. For the bargain tier, you get the literal 90-120 minute “advertisements” I’m aware exist on YouTube (yes, as ad breaks!) that are basically financial scams. Except on Prime they might be unskippable depending on the device you’re using.

Then Bezos will have so much money he’ll need a second monocle.

With huge companies and VC willing to spend unlimited sums of money to get a monopoly in some segment they eventually want to milk it as much as they can, cause they killed meaningful competition.

More often than not I move from one service to the next because the last service got so shitty/annoying/terrible privacy decisions that I jumped ship.

The internet and tech was meant to be a wild west of ideas and options but if it ever was that was a sadly brief period.

> I dislike repeating "enshittification" so much, but behavior like this seems to be spreading at an exponential rate.

Modern-day capitalism optimizes for maximum enshittification, because there isn't enough competition to encourage any other result. Occasionally you'll have a company that does what's "supposed" to happen: provide a generally better product to gain market share against competitors, but that's rare. Pretty quickly they start responding to the same incentives as the incumbents, and enshittify their products too.

Modern technology has also been a double-edge sword. It's provided consumer benefits, but has never really lived up to its potential, because "innovation" frequently means new consumer-hostile uses of the technology (e.g. pervasive communications technology means your car can now provide a middling navigation app; as well as can spy on you, sell your data, and show you ads).

Enshittification seems redundant — shouldn't it just be shittification?

Enshittification aptly describes the symptoms, but it doesn't explain the problem.

The underlying issue is that enshittification is just growth induced entropy. The constant accumulation of half-baked features or user-hostile choices. Every business that is pressured by investors to grow suffers from this. It's the commercial equivalent of old age. It's why the advertising slowly increases everywhere, why Spotify can't just stay a decent app, why each new release of Windows only rearranges the ads and throws in a new version of the control panel.

The cycle is inescapable: * Startup has modicum of success * Success attracts investors/cash * Cash is spent hiring "talent" * The talent has to build SOMETHING * And by definition, half of what the talent produces is BELOW AVERAGE

And so it goes, the mutations increase, the telomeres shorten, and eventually the product ends up in the nursing home wishing it had spent more time just focusing on what was important.

Doesn't surprise me. The economy demands exponential growth. Companies demand exponential growth. First the force in ads, then they offer a subscription to get rid of ads, then they put ads back in and jack up the subscription price, etc etc etc...

> the piracy landscape has become much more ergonomic over the last few years.

I've already been considering the idea of just buying my media when I want it and see how that compares to my streaming bill. I'm willing to pay for things. I think that's important. I'd just like to make sure I'm getting what I want when I buy in, and the proliferation of services has come with the likelihood that not only will the ones I have not have specific content I'm looking for, some shows aren't available at all, which means I have to buy anyway.

But ads in things I'm already paying for are a new level of problem that are an expression of contempt for both the customer and the product. Streamers: it's not enough that I'm paying you for access to the content you've made or secured a right to so that I can give it my full attention? You also want to actually dilute the value of that by requiring me to divert my attention somewhere else?

That's an outright invitation to media piracy. If you're going to spend your attention on something extraneous to the actual media, the digital literacy skills involved in piracy are more generally useful than an advertisement. Not to mention the satisfaction in sending a message to people who'll erode the value of their own product to bump profit margins.

I might accept a price raise. Lots of streaming was probably underpriced in the first place. Add $25-50 a year to my bill and I'll keep paying for it if the value is there. But subtract from the value and I'll find a substitute.

It's depressing, but what's frustrating to me is that my instinct is the pricing is also just "what the market will bear" and not "advertisers would pay us $3 a month to stuff garbage in your eyeballs, so you need to match their offer". So not only is it ruthlessly milking us, it's using a false justification to do it.

Can you clarify? Ads never crept into the premium channels like HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Movie Channel. At least no third party ads beyond the internal promotions between uninterrupted movies/shows. I haven't had cable for ~5 years, so maybe things have changed?

I wouldn't say HBO became "as terrible as the free channels". I would say perhaps HBO is now as bad as the free channels once were, and the free channels are worse than ever. The last time I visited my grandmother I saw a few minutes of daytime network TV out of the corner of my eye and good god, I don't have anything else to compare it to. It reminds me of an article I read a long time ago about the continual decay of pretty much any publishing organization. It showed magazines when they were new, and the same magazines the year before they went out of business. At the end, the magazines were 75% ads, 25% "content". TV is the same way. At some point in the future, some new competitor will come in promising all the things HBO used to deliver. And in time they'll decay as well.

Sorry, I think you've missed the mark a bit on your history:

Originally, all cable channels were ad-free, because you paid for them.

Over time, ads crept in until everything but premium cable became equally infested.

I wonder if the writers strike has anything to do with it. The studios are not going to make "less" money, so instead they will just increase the money, squeezed out of consumers by running commercials, and raising prices.

> This on top of getting increasingly terrible shipping from Prime has me thinking it's no longer worth it.

I thought that years ago: it seemed like orders actually arrived as slowly as they did pre-Prime (e.g. not 2 day shipping), so I canceled Prime and thought there wouldn't be much of a loss. Then my Amazon shipping became even more terrible. Everything was basically no-rush shipping with a $25 minimum order.

So basically, when Prime started, you got better service for an extra fee, and if you didn't pay you got "normal" service. Now you have pay to get "normal" service, and if you don't you get bad service.

I quit Amazon prime mid-pandemic as the shipping went from 2 days to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (and never recovered). I kept them until I watched Wheel of Time first season, and when I realized how awful their adaptation was, I dropped my years-old subscription happily. It's harder for me to get individual small things, but at least my chances of it being counterfeit are lower and I can generally expect them in a reasonable time. I just hate paying for shipping now; still worth it.

is someone still using windows media player?

> There was a strict sense of not diluting the Prime brand with things that members would see value in.

Prime Video was something I didn't ask for. I just wanted Prime shipping. When Video launched, suddenly I was getting charged about 2x as much for no added value, with no chance to opt out.

To make matters worse, since I was being coerced into paying for Video, I decided to try it out. Picked some series I was interested in. Watched seasons 1 and 2. Season 3 had to be rented or purchased separately to my Prime subscription. Similar things happened with other programs as well.

Prime Video has been the flagship of enshittification since launch.

This is sarcasm right? The ads will function as an additional revenue stream at the current price. Rich company gets richer by shoving ads in your face. Nothing is getting cheaper. The existing thing is getting worse and you have the option to pay more if you like.

The skippable pre-rolls already annoy me enough. But no, this will be full on un-skippable ads in the middle of your content.

I haven't seen pre-roll ads lately on Amazon Prime BTW. I started a movie just now to confirm.

According to Amazon it's been streamed a ton.

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/lord-of-the-rings-ratings-r...

The obvious caveat to this being that we don't know how Amazon collect this data or if it's even accurate in any way. Furthermore, even if it has been viewed a lot, that could just be a result of Amazon putting it on the homepage of the app/webpage (which would make it easy to play accidentally) and autoplaying it after finishing other Prime Video content.

From the article it sounds like trying to make more from the remaining user base after people cancelled subscriptions during 2022 for living expenses. Presumably the remainding people are less price sensitive. It does seem like a pretty significant increase in price though - something like 30% increase to avoid ads.

I only watch a few prime series, so my plan will be to only upgrade during months they release new seasons and downgrade as soon as I’m finished.

Prime video is free with your Prime subscription. You are going to go back to slow, paid delivery on Amazon?

Why would anyone "trust" a company to not raise prices or otherwise try to make more money?

Was Netflix, for example, expected to be $9.99/month for the rest of our entire lives? That is an insane thing to expect. Yet people always act like it's some great betrayal that, five years later, they need to pay another couple bucks for the same service.

Trust is irrelevant when you've got the kind of market dominance Amazon has.

Even if you don't use Prime, don't buy anything on Amazon.com, and don't shop at Whole Foods...you're still guaranteed to be sending money their way, due to how much of the Internet they provide support for with AWS. Visited joesrandomwebsite.cheaptld recently? Well, it's hosted on a service that uses AWS, so most of its ad revenue goes straight to paying Amazon for that.

Coca Cola recovered fine from New Coke though. Maybe because they didn't double down on it.

Do you mean promos for Prime shows? Or actual ads, for "stuff". If it's the latter, you may be in an A/B test.

Yep I’ve had ads for years. Sometimes you can skip.