Amazon Gives Giant Middle Finger To Prime Video Customers, Will Charge $3 Extra A Month To Avoid Ads Starting In January

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’s utterly insatiable demand for improved quarterly returns at any cost.

All while the underlying product quality deteriorates due to corner cutting and employees struggle to get paid (see: the giant, ridiculous turd that is the Time Warner Discovery merger).

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 recently announced it would start hitting those users with entirely new streaming TV ads, something you can only avoid if you’re willing to shell out an additional $3 a month.

There was ample backlash to Amazon’s plan, but it apparently accomplished nothing. Amazon says it’s moving full steam ahead with the plan, which will begin on January 29th:

“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,” the company wrote. Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements.”

If you recall, it took the cable TV, film, music, and broadcast sectors the better part of two decades before they were willing to give users affordable, online access to their content as part of a broader bid to combat piracy. There was just an endless amount of teeth gnashing by industry executives as they were pulled kicking and screaming into the future.

Despite having just gone through that experience, streaming executives refuse to learn anything from it, and are dead set on nickel and diming their users. This will inevitably drive a non-insignificant amount of those users back to piracy, at which point executives will blame the shift on absolutely everything and anything other than themselves. And the cycle continues in perpetuity…