Instead, I'll complain about commercials: why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-free? Do we actually value our time less than advertisers do?
Same thing happened with cable TV when it first came out, it was advertised as ad free. Then it filled up with ads, and the streaming services came along promising no ads. Now the circle is repeating itself.
Here is the NYTimes in 1981 on the topic https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
> ...critics say that the use of sponsorship could make cable programmers more vulnerable to censorship or control by advertisers, particularly in light of recent efforts by organizations such as the Moral Majority and its offshoot, the Coalition for Better Television.
40+ years later I think it's pretty clear this was an accurate prediction.
> A much-cited - and widely disputed - study by the Benton & Bowles advertising agency found that the public would accept advertising if it meant a reduction or a holding-of-the-line on subscription fees...
This is great until a year later when YoY revenue growth is flat and prices are increased anyway.
how does it work for HBO then.
In reality, cable TV had ads from day one, decades before this article was published. Originally every cable TV station had ads, because they were just retransmissions of broadcast stations which ran ads. The first nation-wide cable TV station had ads, and many of the early cable-only channels (CNN, USA, others) had ads.
So, to answer your question. I think we do value our time less than advertisers do. Worse, is I suspect your eyeballs becomes more valuable to advertisers the more your willing to pay to not see ads...
This same attitude is also why I stopped doing any business with Amazon years ago. They became intolerable.
No one can afford to compete with large media corporations, because Copyright explicitly turns media corporations into monopolies.
If your assertion is that the concept of monopoly somehow keeps itself exclusive to that specific context, then I sincerely disagree. The system is what the system is made of.
That's fine, but you're using a strange definition. Monopoly is something that's bad. I own my house, which could be called a monopoly. I am my kids' dad - another monopoly, in the world of strange definitions. It's not useful to use words with specific meanings, particularly negative meanings, and repurpose them for everyday, non-negative situations. It's the opposite of useful. And that's why I hope you retain your monopoly on this silly definition.
Property and monopoly are similar, but not the same. Monopoly applies to a set of items, not a single item or group of items.
For example, you can "own" a copy of Pulp Fiction. You can watch it, you can break it, and you can sell it. What you are not allowed to do is sell a copy of the one you own. You are not allowed to do so, because Miramax LLC was granted a monopoly over the set of all Pulp Fiction copies.
You can own your house, but that is not the same as monopolizing the entire market of houses.
Sure, they can compete in the larger overall market of all books in general, but they must avoid the segment of that market that you own a copyright to.
We can. You just have to make it first.
This is not a question to ask of others, it a just question you ask yourself. Once you answer it for yourself, then just realize that same answer applies to everyone from their perspective.
But how? I don't have the resources to build something like this on my own. I'm skeptical I could convince many investors to give me money to build something pitched as "just like Prime Video but without the ad revenue" when Amazon has certainly already done market research and determined this is the best path to maximize profit.
They've been made. Repeatedly. They just don't persist.
Our economic system won't let them.
Only in the absence of competition. Prices go down all the time while growth remains positive.
> why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-free
You can, it just costs more. Ads are a way to make sure that there's a product for more price sensitive customers while keeping revenue high.
The real problem for streamers isn't pricing, it's churn.
Yes, clearly, as revealed by the way most consumers act.
How many people do you know that actually pay for YouTube to get rid of ads? I personally do, and I encourage everyone else to do so, but I assume it's a tiny market.
Perhaps they should have raised the rate of base Prime, and then offered a lower priced paid w/ads option. But there was probably an issue with the annual holders in that case.
So, instead they lowered the features and now folks can up to the new subscription.
Google, Facebook and now Amazon realized the big money is in brokering ads. As brokers, they know everything and control everything, exploiting both the viewers and advertisers.
The bundling makes cancellation particularly unlikely: you can't (or at least I don't know how to) cancel the Prime Video part of the Prime package alone, so there's no way to show your dissatisfaction with this short of cancelling the entire Prime membership. Which this latest push, however small on its own, has been enough to get me finally to consider doing, but it's still tough.
The thing is I live less than 3 hours from a big warehouse (people who live in the same ZIP code as one of those warehouses often get 5-day shipping) but it seems that the residents of Upstate New York and New England are frequently treated as unpeople when it comes to facilities and infrastructure.
Why won't I leave Prime (yet)? Because I have an "Amazon" visa credit card, with an admittedly serious 5% permanent discount on all purchases from Amazon (as well as companies they own, such as Whole Foods.) I won't stop purchasing products through Prime just yet; am simply careful to avoid anything that looks problematic, price-gouged, or needing aftersale support, and the discount lock-in is too attractive to me to ignore for now. But video? I can always find it elsewhere. Same goes for "FreeVee" because "Free with ads" isn't free.
So if Prime is failing you in other ways, don't feel like you need to keep it to keep your discount.
However, I'm seriously reconsidering my choices. Almost my entire family is in the Apple ecosystem and we recently purchased an Apple TV device to replace a FireTV, and I must say that it is a much better experience. And iCloud is a better photo/video sharing platform for us than Prime Photos ever was. Really, the only thing keeping me subscribed to Prime is the cash-back program.
As for Prime Video, it has always been the most crappy of the video streaming options. It's always frustrating when the things that I want to watch are not included with Prime and require a purchase or rental. And now that there are ads and lower quality, the chance that I'll watch anything on that platform is steadily declining.
Now it’s generally 4 working days, sometimes more.
Almost all the services I’ve used Amazon for in the past keep getting worse. Prime shipping, video, Amazon music, etc
Their drivers are also the worst. The driver that covers my area tends to throw packages a good 10 feet at my door. Needless to say, Amazon is pretty much my last choice option these days.
You don’t want to know what happens in warehouses…
I could be reading that wrong, but it was sure how it looked with my first few non-Prime orders.
1. In most cases my Amazon orders took about the same amount of time to get to my house as they did with Prime: 3-4 days
2. Amazon has some terrible dark patterns. For example, on the product page you always see the lowest priced shipping option (usually free), but at checkout it defaults to paid shipping. It's really easy to accidentally pay an extra $5.99 for shipping, often with the same estimated arrival it would've had with free shipping.
If they had simply raised the price of Prime, I would have been mildly annoyed for 30 minutes and moved on with my life, as I had done many times before. Instead, on top of my yearly Prime membership, I was going to get charge a monthly fee… this just hit all the wrong notes for me. It felt so cheap. Here I am paying for a premium service and they are going to nickel and dime me with a monthly charge on top of the yearly one. Not a chance in hell. I cancelled my Prime membership after 15 years over this move and have no regrets.
I hope I’m not alone in that. Prime Video is my least watched steaming service and waiting a few extra days for free shipping hasn’t been a big deal.
When cancelling there was no point where they asked why, which I found interesting.
I am a person who will pay to avoid ads. I have YouTube Premium and pay for the ad free Hulu tier. I also always pay extra to get the Kindle without ads, and pay to remove ads in any app I download within minutes. I even pay for my search engine (Kagi) instead of using Google or DDG. I’m the person they were after, but not like this.
I’m curious how many people they expected to pay for this. A modest price hike for everyone would likely have been more profitable and been mostly ignored by everyone. If they wanted to start breaking down the services to offer cheaper options to people looking for it, they should revamp the whole system. Present the 50 Prime offers and let people pick what they want, or have a few different bundles. Shipping and Videos were basically the only 2 things I used, so everything else was of no value to me.
It sucks that the price point keeps getting farther away, but it does exist.