The Enshittification Of Streaming Continues As Amazon Starts Charging Prime Video Customers Even More Money To Avoid Ads
from the enshittify-ALL-the-things! dept
Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, the streaming industry has started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from “enshittification,” that generally means imposing obnoxious new restrictions (see: Netflix password sharing), endless price hikes, and obnoxious and dubious new fees geared toward pleasing Wall Street.
Case in point: Amazon customers already pay $15 per month, or $139 annually for Amazon Prime, which includes a subscription to Amazon’s streaming TV service. In a bid to make Wall Street happy, Amazon has apparently decided it makes good sense to start hitting those users with entirely new streaming TV ads, then charge an additional $3 per month to avoid them:
“US-based Prime members will be able to revert back to an ad-free experience for an additional $2.99 per month on top of their existing subscription. Prime memberships in the US cost $14.99 per month, or $139 per year if paid annually. Pricing for the ad-free option for other countries will be shared “at a later date.”
Of course imposing new annoyances you then have to pay extra to avoid is just a very small part of Amazon’s overall quest to boost revenues at the cost of market health, competition, customer satisfaction, and the long-term viability of its sellers.
Ideally, competition in streaming is supposed to result in companies improving product quality and, ultimately, competing on price. But eager to feed Wall Street’s insatiable and often myopic need for improved quarterly returns at any cost, streaming giants have begun extracting additional pounds of flesh wherever and however they can, product quality and consumer satisfaction be damned.
That (combined with stupid and pointless mergers and “growth for growth’s sake” consolidation) results in streaming services that are increasingly expensive, lower quality than ever (see the decline of HBO as one shining example), and don’t much care about the consumer experience. That’s before you get to the endless industry layoffs or the media industry’s protracted unwillingness to pay creatives a living wage.
All overseen by a suite of unremarkable, fail-upward, overpaid executives (see: Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav) who show absolutely no indication that they genuinely understand the industry they do business in or have any real empathy for employees or consumers. The result is higher prices, worse product quality, lower employee pay, plenty of industry chaos, and enshittification.
So, it’s not terribly surprising short-sighted executives can’t see this is the exact trajectory and decision making process that opened the traditional cable industry to painful and protracted disruption, ensuring history simply repeats itself in perpetuity.
Filed Under: advertisements, amazon prime, competition, consumers, enshittification, price hikes, streaming, tv
Companies: amazon
Comments on “The Enshittification Of Streaming Continues As Amazon Starts Charging Prime Video Customers Even More Money To Avoid Ads”
And the cycle’s gonna continue and continue until either they stop listening to wall street or they no longer exist.
Likely the latter.
“imposing obnoxious new restrictions (see: Netflix password sharing), endless price hikes, and obnoxious and dubious new fees geared toward pleasing Wall Street.”
What a shitty business model.
Just my guess...
Amazon will coerce its vendors to buy ads on Prime Video with links to to their Amazon product page. That’s where the real money will come from.
This is why I only use YouTube.
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because YT ad-blockers work there?
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Yes, they surely do work. I’m on Brave, and once in awhile a YouTube ad will get through, but mostly… In such cases I rely on Ad-Guard, that does the trick, full stop.
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However, a lot of youtube contest creators now place the ad content within their content directly and hence it’s not an ad that can be automatically blocked. But thankfully, it can still be manually skipped through. Suspect that a future feature of YouTube will be to give content creators the ability to designate sections of their videos to be unskippable.
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That’s what SponsorBlock is for.
I’m more annoyed by more and more YouTube channels setting up their own exclusive website content subscriptions. I understand the bottom may slowly be falling out of YouTube from greed and declining ad revenue among being a victim of a black box algorithm, but it’s just more fracturing and expenses no one has.
Been an Amazon Prime member since they introduced the plan, largely because I buy supplies and equipment for my business. However, the 2-day delivery often isn’t and I’m finding better prices other places, e.g,. Walmart, which also offers 2-day delivery. I don’t watch anything on TV except an occasional football game, but my wife does. She has several other streaming accounts, and I suspect we’re going to be able to dump Amazon Prime. I don’t like being “nickeled and dimed.” I’ve also learned that their much touted pharmacy isn’t compatible with my health insurance.
Even tho I pay for Prime and Netflix, I’m increasingly watching their content on pirate sites. Because search actually works there and I don’t get ads before each episode.
That’s some bass-ackwards speak right there.
How to slash your income with 1 simple trick….
Suddenly introduce advertisement & tell people well you can just pay us more to avoid the ads.
Prime isn’t the deal it once was, and with the nickel and dime brigade looking to make wall street another few pennies this won’t be the last time they decide to add (we need a word for features that explains its not a fucking feature but just a way to try and suck more cash from long term users thinking they’ll just pony up) another revenue stream thats only going to serve to to harm the bottom line in the end.
Whats going to be amazing is amazon suddenly waking up to discover they managed to kill off everything consumers liked & wanted and they have to fight to get them back but consumers aren’t liable to forgive.
The limitations of the subscription business model at work. You can only grow subscriber numbers so much before they plateau, the cost of licensing or making films and TV shows and the unreasonable demands of shareholders seeking “unlimited growth” (an impossiblity) mean that it was inevitable that streaming platforms would one day start behaving like the traditional media companies they wanted to disrupt. It’s not the enshitification of streaming companies, it’s the enshitification of capitalism otherwise known as late stage capitalism
Re: Crazy part
The Crazy part is that the fix is fairly simple, move from “All you can eat” to a just slighly limited model (100 hours per month!) with extra hours costing like 2.99 per 100 or something.
Now you can go back to huge catalogs since residuals and fees can be paid out of the sub and hours allotments. Hell with all the news and writers strikes and such the general population is primed for a change here.
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No. No, no no nono….
You do NOT get to put the bullshit ISP caps on fscking streaming.
Sorry they paid way to much money to acquire a thing, but not this one part of the thing, so they can churn out a bunch of horrible web optimized content designed to cash in on a fandom they really don’t know or care anything about.
It’s little wonder that piracy is making a comeback in some markets (content fragmentation is another part of enshittification).
Amazon's lost a customer
Prime free shipping + video was barely worth it, take away ad-free video and the proposition no longer makes sense.
But that’s okay, Amazon (along with Netflix) makes very little worth watching anyway. Cancelling once I finish The Boys will be painless.
The true solution is to get to the absolute roots of the problem and either toss it into the sun or sink it in the Pacific subduction zone.
How much of wallstreet would that be?
Indeed
I have to deal with being shown previews on Paramount+, often of shows I am already subscribed to on the service. They don’t even try to build in some intelligence. And this is still an ad even if they call it a preview.
And the apps themselves leave much to be desired. Ever try to use the menu to leave NetFlix? Fortunately the circle button on my remote for my Nvidia Shield Pro to take me out to he main menu. Also useful for when in the Hulu and Peacock apps when they ask if you8’re sure you want to leave.
Paramount+ randomly resets my viewing in a show. This means at times it shows an episode as unseen although I had watched it. And at times it returns a series or a movie back to the viewing area, even when I am completely finished with it.
And if you make me go to the website so I can take some action, I am looking at Paramount+ and Prime, then you really suck.
I am no longer going to subscribe for whole years at a time. I will subscribe for a month after several shows have all been “aired”, and I’ll consume like a locust and then move on.
The thing that was great about streaming until recently was that I could watch the show or movie without anything at the beginning or in-between or at the end.
Why is it everything has to be turned into a broadcast?