‘An update on Prime Video’

Amazon, in an email tonight:

We are writing to you today about an upcoming change to your Prime Video experience. Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month that you can sign up for here.

Prime is a very compelling value. […]

A better PR decision would probably be to offer an ad-supported tier at a lower cost right now and leave the ad-free tier alone. Then, in six months or so, raise the price of the ad-free plan by the same $3. They’d probably get less blow-back that way.

But I appreciate that this feels more honest, somehow.

And, I suppose they’re getting ad money for brands to reach a very large customer base since I expect almost no one will cancel Prime because of this alone. It’ll take effort and more money to join the ad-free tier.

Related: I recently heard (can’t remember where) that apart from Netflix, Prime Video has the most content available of all the streaming platforms. Color me surprised at that. You — well, I — hardly ever hear about Amazon’s streaming service.