Amazon Enshittifies Prime Streaming With Higher Costs To Avoid Ads
from the enshittification-as-a-service dept
Back in early 2024, Amazon announced that Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) would be charged $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn’t previously exist. It was just the latest example of “enshittification” in a streaming sector all out of original ideas, desperate to provide Wall Street with impossible skyward quarterly growth — regardless of consumer annoyance or brand harm.
And it just got worse.
Just recently, Amazon informed subscribers that the $3 extra fee to avoid ads would now be $5 a month. Again, on top of the $140 people are already paying. Worse, Amazon appears to be eliminating 4K support for its ad-based offerings to funnel users toward paying more if they want to enjoy the now fairly basic standard:
“On April 10, 2026, Prime Video’s ad-free subscription will become Prime Video Ultra in the U.S., priced at $4.99 per month. The new Ultra subscription includes other perks: Subscribers will have up to five concurrent streams (previously three), up to 100 downloads for offline viewing (previously 25) and exclusive access to 4K/UHD streaming.”
Variety parrots the claim these are “perks,” but they’re really just arbitrary old and new restrictions being shuffled around to drive users to more expensive options if they want much of the same experience they had before when they were paying less money.
This sort of “funneling” was pioneered by the traditional cable, broadband, and wireless sector, which creatively found new ways to abuse market power to extract more and more money from captured subscribers. There was a whole multi-year tech policy war about it (net neutrality) which U.S. consumers decidedly lost. Streaming’s a bit different because users still have options and agency. For now.
As new growth in streaming customers has slowed down, giant media companies have returned to these ancient ways to give Wall Street their sweet, sweet, improved quarterly returns and illusions of bottomless growth. That means not just price hikes, but layoffs, pointless mergers, less money spent on content and residuals (meaning they’re too cheap to keep popular programs online), and crackdowns on things that used to be consumer benefits, like password sharing.
The short term stock boosts and tax gains from this kind of gamesmanship and consolidation disincentivizes execs from learning anything useful from the experience. By the time consumers begin a backlash and the longer-term health of the service begins to tank, the executives who led the charge are already off working at a different company on the basis of their “savvy deal-making prowess.”
When consumers inevitably flee to cheaper or free alternatives (YouTube, Twitch, piracy, whatever), the execs that remain then blame literally everything and everyone (generational entitlement!, VPNs!, avocado toast!) for their own greed and bad decisions. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
Filed Under: advertisements, enshittification, fees, prime video, streaming
Companies: amazon
Comments on “Amazon Enshittifies Prime Streaming With Higher Costs To Avoid Ads”
At some point, piracy becomes the only option left.
Re:
Oh, I’m not so sure. I was until I took a look at what films have been made in the past five-ish years and promptly lost all interest yet again.
I spent at least an hour or so looking, but precisely nothing interested me enough to even spend the minutes required to pirate it. I am, apparently, far enough from Hollywood’s target demographics I won’t have to worry overly much about budgeting for Hollywood-media consumption in future, by the looks of things.
Re: big red button
You’re ignoring the other option: the big red button marked ‘off’.
Re: Re:
Big red button? What kind of streaming device are you using, Fisher-Price?
Re: Re: Re:
The big red button is usually marked “Netflix”, because the manufacturer gets a dollar for every remote with that button. Of course, some of them are taking money from other streaming services, making the usually already-bad remote worse (infrared communication almost always sucks, excepting one unusually powerful and responsive remote I had circa 1990).
Horrible Streaming Platform
Amazon Prime Video is the worst streaming service period. What is wrong with them? Most of the videos on the platform are subscription only or for rent. They mix in the “included with prime” and make it very frustrating. Why not have a default setting that allows you to only browse videos included with prime?
If not for the shipping I would never subscribe to prime.
Re:
Why not have a setting that allows you to see IMDb ratings beside every video? They used to do that, but I guess it was not optimal for their profits. I suppose the same is true about mixing in non-included videos.
Well, there’s your answer. You’re complaining about the service but paying for it anyway.
If you haven’t already done so, I suggest you go through your past orders and calculate whether the subscription is actually saving you money, noting that there are ways to get free shipping without Prime.
Re:
It used to be pretty easy to select to see only material in the “included with primee” category. I have no doubt it was removed to keep pushing other services.
This is just disgraceful you know! Have you seen the price increases?! Bribes are up 50%, and the cost of a child slave is up 80%! How do you expect billionaires to live if they can’t afford their basic necessities!
By the time consumers begin a backlash and the longer-term health of the service begins to tank, the executives who led the charge are already off working at a different company on the basis of their “savvy deal-making prowess.”
So true. Pretty much the only way not to fail upward in American business is to rip off the wrong people — the rich and powerful. As long as you target the public, you can do anything you want; but inconvenience a few billionaires for a day or two and you’re screwed.
This why Trevor Milton and Martin Shkreli and other assorted sphincters are still walking around and Elizabeth Holmes is not.
I like how pretty much every single one of my friends has mocked me (tried to impart FOMO, more like) over the years for never once giving any of these shithouses neither a penny nor a minute of my time.
They’re keeping their noise holes markedly shut on the matter, these days.
I already cancelled Amazon when they first introduced this fee to avoid ads on top of a lot of content being charged extra to be watched (some sort of 24h rental). And for me 4k is not worth it. Not to mention how shitty is the interface. Going without stuff is remarkably easy.
AFAICT you can still avoid the ads by watching in Firefox with uBlock Origin.
Maybe someday they’ll actually use it.
Of course, that is way less than the inflation due to Biden.
It’s literally less than inflation.
But you don’t care about facts, you just want to hate on big companies (unless they’re a very liberal news org).