Amazon Prime Video Starts Charging Extra To Avoid Ads, As The Enshittification Of Streaming Video Truly Begins

Starting this week, Amazon Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) will be charged $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn’t previously exist. Shifting toward ad-based tiers has been popular among streaming companies like Netflix, Max, Disney+, and Paramount. But whereas those services make a cheaper ad-based tier an opt-in choice for consumers, Amazon isn’t being so subtle:

“A key piece of Amazon’s ad model is that they are throwing you into its ad-filled tier as its default when you originally could watch Prime Video with no interruptions. Most competitors haven’t been so brash, and have introduced ads more subtly by offering a cheaper option.”

As new growth in streaming customers has slowed down, giant media companies have relegated to seeking new ways to give Wall Street their sweet, sweet, improved quarterly returns. That means not just price hikes, layoffs, pointless mergers, or less money spent on quality content, but crackdowns on things that used to be consumer benefits, like the lax treatment of things like password sharing.

Implementing advertising into the existing streaming model lets companies not only steadily jack up the price of subscription service, but steadily jack up the rates they charge advertisers. A big win for them, but a lower quality product for the actual user.

The problem is: once your on this particular road, there’s no end to it. Just ask Comcast. Or any company that has to shift from pesky disruptive upstart to giant turf protector.

It’s simply not good enough for publicly-traded companies to offer consumers an affordable product that people really like. They’ve got to provide steady quarter over quarter boosts to profits — at any cost. That results in a sort of self-cannibalization, recently popularized by Cory Doctorow as “enshittification.”

The streaming sector’s just getting started. It begins with price hikes, lower quality service, layoffs, pointless mergers (see: Max) and charging users more money to bypass annoyances that didn’t exist previously (Amazon is here!). But will eventually morph into things like lower quality customer service, entirely new restrictions, hidden fees, or making it hard as hell to actually cancel service.

Streaming is only at the beginning of the enshittification cycle, so I’d expect the value proposition to remain semi-respectable for another few years. But as the sector consolidates into a dwindling number of companies — all prioritizing Wall Street’s wishes over consumer satisfaction or product quality — I’d expect streaming to steadily become more and more like the shitty old cable industry it once disrupted.

At which point new entertainment business modes, free services (Twitch, YouTube, Tiktok) and piracy re-enter the frame as revitalized disruption agents, and the cycle repeats all over again.