Amazon to increase number of advertisements on Prime Video

Dropped my prime subscription when they added the first lot of ads. I don’t buy enough stuff to make the free shipping worth it on its own, and was mostly there for video anyway, so having ads immediately killed the value proposition for me.

The ads on Prime Video are the worst. At first they seem like your typical TV ads, but they have that uncanny valley / gen AI vibe that gives me a weird icky feeling. They have ads for movies on Prime, which are composed of totally random clips from the movie that make absolutely zero sense when mashed together. Then they have ads for random Amazon garbage products like phone holders, which try to look like grassroots YouTube videos. Honestly makes it hard to watch. Prime Video feels like a committee-driven ad agency masquerading as a TV studio.

I have prime for actually buying stuff, but I never use the video/music there, particularly since they've started shoveling ads at you now, I've even less incentive to use it.

I still download anything I want to watch from the usual places using radarr, sonarr, etc, playback on everything on kodi anywhere (even in VR bigscreen), and look ma, no commercials. Ever.

I cannot abide commercials ever since max headroom blipverts as a kid in the 80's got me thinking about what commercials really were. You shouldn't either. Defund the media cartels and say no to commercials.

My sister doesn't see ads on Prime Video, but I do. My theory is that I order more stuff from Amazon than she does, so get enough value from the free shipping aspect that I'm not likely to cancel my Prime subscription, even though I've stopped watching Prime Video since the ads started. TV is just not good enough for me to watch ads, ever. I'll dust the furniture over watching ads!

All of these services reverting to ads just makes me feel like we’ve gotten such a bullshit corpo rug pull compared to cable. Cable was nice and bundled and it was like a pipe of shows. It was super convenient with a unified interface. But we switched to streaming because in every other way it was better. Especially that there were no commercials. It makes me really angry when I start talking about it because it just feels like a betrayal of the benefits of these services. It felt like the consumer had won, like a battle had been fought that we’d gotten past marketing and advertising controlling media. But it’s just more of the same. Amazon and these other streaming services just can’t cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. The temptation of money is simply too tempting.

At this point I’m never giving up my PLEX server, especially for my children’s sake. Primarily because I control exactly what they get to see (mostly shows from when I was growing up). Also a funny side effect is they get really confused when they see advertisements.

FWIW the ad free costs 2EUR / month in Europe, which is very cheap compared to any other subscription.

I can't find a way to strip these out, so I am considering another approach. Is there an alternative frontend for consuming Prime Video?

If not, how hard would it be to interact with the hdmi stream and implement an auto-mute feature? I've been considering ways to remove these annoyances and since they don't provide a convenient way for smart people they're justifying the effort to a more complicated approach.

These companies need to leave some low-hanging fruit or they're going to be incentivizing a whole host of developers who are more motivated to solve this problem than anyone they could possibly hire internally.

Finally. These ads are actually really effective at breaking my procrastination cycles and getting me away from the screen for a while.

My prime membership lapsed recently and when I really thought about it I didn't see a need to renew it. Even with the video portion, it does not have the same value anymore. Not when I can get the same products from other retailers with free shipping automatically thrown in.