The age of streaming continues to flourish, but subscribers are undoubtedly starting to feel the heavy bills coming their way. In recent months, streaming services have implemented price increases, and Amazon is not about to pass up the opportunity to do the same.
Amazon Prime Video's Ad-Free Service
The point of subscribing to streaming services is that you won't have to suffer through ads, as well as have access to the service's content. Companies like Netflix thought about adding ads to certain tiers to lessen the price, but Amazon has a different approach.
Instead of offering a less expensive plan in exchange for watching a few ads, they will instead add them to the standard plan and somewhat create a new offer that's more expensive for ad-free streaming. For uninterrupted content, you'll have to add $2.99 more to your current plan.
The change was announced via email, which was sent to Prime members. It says that starting on January 29th, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. Those who don't want to be bothered by the price increase don't have to do anything.
Of course, that would mean encountering ads now and then. Amazon expressed that it will allow the company to "continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time," as reported by Ars Technica.
As for how many ads will show up while you're streaming, the retail giant said that they aim to have "meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers," although that doesn't really answer much.
With the change, the standard plan essentially becomes the ad-tier plan, making it significantly more expensive than Netflix's. The latter's ad tier only costs $6.99, while Amazon's upcoming Prime Video plan with ads is $8.99.
With these new prices, it's getting more impractical to have more than one streaming service subscription. Disney+ now costs $14 a month for an ad-free experience, while Hulu is priced at $18 a month. Netflix's latest price increase puts it at up to $22.99 per month.
Users Would Rather Return to Pirating
The increase in prices has been hurting a lot of consumers as they can no longer afford the services. This has prompted many to return to pirating content online. Cord-cutting is not the cheaper option anymore, and the age of cheaper streaming is over.
Other than price increases, streaming services are cracking down on password sharing as well, starting with Netflix and followed by others. With that said, this has contributed to users going back to piracy, as reported by Cybernews.
As you know, piracy means that you get to watch the content you want for free just by downloading it from third-party sites. This comes with a lot of risks since some files contain malware, but users are just about prepared for that risk instead of paying the new high prices.
Music producer Omar Zulfi said: "With so many different services to subscribe to for different content, password crackdowns, continual price increases... people will start considering going back to pirating their media."
