Amazon Prime Video ads are coming; streaming price hikes in 2024

Well, it was nice while it lasted. Amazon Prime Video was one of the last major streaming services not to have commercials on its platform. But Amazon announced today that that’s all changing beginning next year.

In a blog post, the company revealed that ads will be coming to Amazon Prime Video in 2024. Ads will first come to Amazon Prime Video in the United States, the UK, Canada, and Germany in “early” 2024. Ads will come to Amazon’s streaming service in France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia later in the year.

“To continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time, starting in early 2024, Prime Video shows and movies will include limited advertisements,” the company said while noting that it aims “to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers.” 

As Variety notes, four minutes of commercials per hour of content seems to be the lowest amount of ad time on streaming services. If Amazon Prime Video’s plans hover around that four-minute mark, that’s still one minute of commercials interrupting your series binging every 15 minutes, on average.

Amazon Prime Video will still offer the ability to watch its content ad-free, but you’ll now need to pay extra for the pleasure. Currently, users in America pay $14.99 per month or $139 per year for Amazon Prime, which includes access to Prime Video. A subscription to only the Amazon Prime Video service currently costs $8.99 a month. Subscribers of all three options will need to pay an additional $2.99 per month if they want Prime Video to remain ad-free beginning in 2024. That’s an additional $35.88 per year.

Amazon Prime Video’s embrace of ads follows nearly every major streaming platform in doing the same. This includes Netflix, Disney Plus, and Max, all of which offer ad-free tiers for a premium. The only major streamer without ad-supported plans is Apple TV Plus.

The move by streaming platforms to embrace ads comes as streamers rack up massive costs for producing original content while consumers look to reduce their monthly bills as inflation and economic worries bite. A major problem for streamers is that consumers will now often just subscribe for a single month to binge whatever series they want to watch and then ditch the service when they’re done, so streaming platforms can’t rely on recurring monthly revenue from a subscriber for the entire year like they used to be able to do.

But as streamers embrace commercials, they risk becoming not much different than cable TV, with its glut of advertising and high monthly subscription fees that drove consumers to streaming in the first place.