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Amazon’s Prime Video will begin to show ads at the end of next month. A move that will either convince people to pay the $3 price increase to avoid ads or consider dropping Prime Video altogether.
The latter will be considerably harder to do if you use Prime for any other reason. For example, if you shop on Amazon and often enjoy the service’s free two-day or same-day shipping. But there’s no doubt that some are likely going to re-evaluate how much Prime is worth the monthly cost.
Ads coming to Prime Video aren’t a surprise since Amazon announced in September that it would begin showing them. But in the initial announcement, it didn’t mention anything other than a general time frame. The company said ads would come to the platform sometime in early 2024. The company has begun sending out emails to alert customers of the upcoming change and this time it includes an exact date. At the end of January subscribers who watch Prime Video content will have to deal with ads. That is if you’re not willing to pay the additional $2.99.
Ads will begin showing in Prime Video content on January 29
According to emails sent out by Amazon (via The Verge), the official date that ads will start playing in Prime Video content is January 29. So you have one month to enjoy Prime Video without ads or pay the $2.99 to enjoy it long after the start date next month. Prime Video was one of the few services left that wasn’t showing ads on its platform.
Netflix began offering an ad-supported tier for $6.99 a month last year. Which no one seemed to want to pay for. Hulu has been showing ads for years. Both Disney+ and Max have started offering ads in 2022 and 2021 respectively. Prime Video has been one of the last bastions of a completely ad-free video streaming platform. But even that had to end sometime.