Last week Amazon began charging Amazon Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) an extra $3 extra per month to avoid ads that didn’t previously exist. One added wrinkle: apparently Amazon also pulled Dolby Vision and Atmos audio support from Prime Video unless users pay the additional toll to avoid ads, a change the company couldn’t be bothered to inform users of.
The move this week resulted in a class action lawsuit by annoyed subscribers, whose lawyers insist that Amazon violated subscriber agreements by suddenly charging for something that subscribers understood they were already paying for:
“Reasonable consumers expect that, if you purchase a subscription with ad-free streaming of movies and tv shows, that the ad-free streaming for movies and tv shows is available for the duration of the purchased subscription.”
We’ll see if this class action results in anything more than lawyers getting a new boat and Prime Video subscribers getting a $3 check sometime by 2027.
Prime Video’s efforts to nickel-and-dime customers is the latest example of the steady enshittification of a streaming video industry that appears to have learned nothing from the scale-chasing issues that plagued cable TV. Now that the market has saturated, streaming companies are looking for creative ways to provide Wall Street the unrealistic endlessly improved quarterly returns bean counters demand.
That inevitably results in a brand quality cannibalization, as once disruptive and innovative upstarts shift toward “creative” efforts to goose profits and lower costs. That generally means price hikes, layoffs, pointless mergers, and less money spent on quality content, as well as crackdowns on things that used to be consumer benefits, like the lax treatment of things like password sharing.
This kind of behavior, in turn, opens the doors to more affordable and convenient alternatives to streaming video subscriptions, whether that’s piracy or free services like Twitch or TikTok. At which point, executives at places like Netflix and Amazon blame everyone but themselves for the subscriber exodus. It’s simply how this never-ending cycle works.
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