I’d seen rumours online but got the email this morning.
EDIT: seems like there won’t be ads for everyone straight away.
- Live events, such as sports, and content offered through Amazon Freevee will continue to include advertising. Customers in the Republic of Ireland, Channel Islands, and Isle of Man won’t see ads in their experience at this time.
You don’t actually have to pay Amazon anything. I suggest you consider this.
Yeah we cancelled last month
Exactly.
I canceled my sub when I got the email. I’m going to pirate anything I want to see from them from now on.
Consider: Pirate everything. It’s just a race to the bottom. The average you can charge for an ad tiered service will just continue shifting up as each streaming service gently increases their ad-free prices. If it was ~$15/mo avg before this, now Netflix sees the avg price go to $15.57/mo. If you’re going to increase the price by 57¢ you might as well make it a nice round $1…Then Hulu sees the average go to $16.13 so then they need to increase their prices. So on and so forth until we’re back to paying $60/mo like we did for cable TV.
And here’s the kicker. They’re legally obligated to do this because they could be sued by shareholders for not trying to make more money. And that’s without mentioning that they actually prefer people to watch the ads because they generate more revenue from sponsored advertising. Pirating is ethical and cool. Paying subscription fees to trillion dollar corporations is cringe.
Profit margins are the concern of people who actually respect capitalism, which I do not.
Steal, motherfucking, everything.
This is a 26% price hike. Amazon’s marketing BS shouldn’t fool anyone.
But… If they don’t do that how will they invest in future programming?? Don’t you understand how little fucking money Amazon makes??
Who else is going to cuddle their nuts and jelq them if we don’t?
True. We must all make sacrifices so Amazon’s profits can grow. Maybe their marketing department should call the increase a “Mandatory Donation for the Good of the World” to help us keep things in perspective.
Options:
-
Pay no extra and suffer annoying adverts in all movies and shows.
-
Pay an extra £35.88 a year to get the same awful experience you had before.
-
Save £95 a year and cancel it. Spend your savings on a VPN, and look into Jellyfin, Radarr and Sonarr. BEST VALUE
For maximum impact:
- Avoid Amazon like the plague.
I’ve been doing it for years and don’t regret it on bit in light of the regular sleazy behaviours of Amazon coming to light (their removing of ebooks that people bought from their Fire Tables alone is the reason why I never bought any digital media from them except for a single music track in MP3 format a decade or so ago).
Is there a guide for dummies you’d recommend. PVR and etc are unknown terms for me. I used to torrent under vpn but that was in the Limewire days… hoping for some help in the safest ways to return to the seas.
There’s plenty of guides for Linux, but with Windows you’re a bit more reliant on installers and reading some of the guides about setting all the bits up.
Off the top of my head, you need:
qBittorrent (for downloading, turn on the web interface, and you can configure it to do nothing if not connected to your VPN)
Prowlarr (this scrapes torrent data from websites and collates it all together for the other parts of this system, add some sources once you install that)
Radarr (browse movies and pick which ones you want, link it to Prowlarr and qBittorrent, give it a folder e.g. D:\Movies to download into)
Sonarr (same as Radarr but for TV, again link it to Prowlarr and qBittorrent, give it a different folder e.g. D:\TV to download into)
Jellyfin (an open source Netflix, allows you to play the stuff you downloaded in a pretty web UI, or through a client program you can get for a couple of platforms, add the folders you told Radarr and Sonarr to download to)
Then you tweak everything that annoys you. By default it’s quite happy to grab full 60GB+ Blu-ray releases, which is fine if you’re on a fast connection and have lots of storage, but if a movie is over 10GB or so, it all looks the same to me. Depending on how you watch, you might have to mess with Jellyfin clients to figure out why certain videos won’t play. It’s pretty good but it’s not perfect.
How does a VPN give you access to shows on Amazon that require Prime? Or do you mean it’ll just give you access to more shows than you’d have otherwise?
The VPN is to shield yourself from DMCA (in the US, of course) while you sail the high seas.
Clean access to content from all streaming services, Ad free and cheaper than a standard Prime Subscription.
Not to mention the broader positive that people getting used to accessing the Internet behind a VPN also screws the Surveillance State we now have in many supposedly democratic nations (remember to switch exit points once in a while).
Even more entertaining, trying to weaken or forbidding VPNs will totally screw lots of really big companies (which use it for allowing their employees to securelly access their networks remotelly) and well as the basis of secure consumer access to financial services, so it’s going to be pretty hard to stop this (notice miserable failure of the UK - pretty much the biggest surveillance state that claims to be democratic - at trying to forbid this stuff over there).
like the other poster said it doesnt give you access to amazon’s shows on amazon’s site. Helpful pirates all over the world tirelessly upload “amazon’s” content to the grand line. When I tell people about a show I’m loving it’s always an interesting conversation when they ask me ‘what service is it on?’ and i straight up have no idea.
perhaps you already know this, but if you don’t, MOST pirate streaming sites have everything from every service right there in a searchable webpage that looks like (usually a discount version but sometimes superior) a paid streaming site.
It’s not even cope to say they are generally easier to navigate and search than the services you have to PAY for. All you need is ublock origin <—(non-negotiable) and you have access to a superior service IMMEDIATELY.
Which oceanic locales would one recommend? I’ve been too long shorebound and many of my navigational charts are outdated.
Probably meant in the context of hiding your piracy activities.
-
And I just cancelled. Fuck them. This is 1990’s pay TV repeating itself. I’m not playing that part of history again.
My Prime subscription renewed in Dec. I didn’t know about the ads arriving. So yesterday I went through support and cancelled my subscription and they agreed to refund what I paid.
If they want to change the membership terms on renewals it’s their right to do so, but changing the terms of an annual subscription after I purchased it is unethical to me.
being unethical is profitable, my good sir.
I’ve worked in Investment Banking for a decade or so some years ago and everything there is calculated and risk-priced with zero moral or ethical considerations (even “Regulatory Risk” or, in other words, “If the risk-adjusted profitabily exceeds other options we will break the Law”).
Funnilly enough I was in the Tech Startup World after than and nowadays (back in the 90s it wasn’t like this) it’s pretty much The Even Wilder Wild West Of Finance - or in other word, riddled with shit from the most speculative end of Finance, only with pretty much zero regulatory oversight so, naturally, riddled with near- and actual-Fraud.
All this to say that somebody in Amazon made the maths using their customer behaviour profiles to calculate the risk of the only negative response possible (people actually cancelling, the other two being the slight positive one of “people stay as they are and watch ads” and the more positive one of “people pay the extra for ad free”) times lost income versus the upsides and determined Amazon’s profit will increase.
Notice how in order to reduce the possibility of people taking the option that’s negative for them, they renew and after it do a one-sided change the terms of the contract, which Nudge Theory tells will yield the maximum number of people just accepting it (so they’ll be in the “stay and watch ads” rather than “cancelling” group), something which for them even has no negatives (people will either still cancel, which is neutral versus telling it to people upfront and they cancelling, or they’ll stick around and take it which is positive for Amazon) hence was a pretty obvious choice for an unethical company.
So, I applaud you for actually activelly going through the gauntlet they put in front of you and cancelling, though I suspect you’re part of a tiny minority.
I suggest spreading the “renewal and then change of contract terms” story is the best way to punish them for their actions, especially emphasising that they’re knowingly pressuring people to stay with highly sleazy screw-the-customer legally dubious techniques.
(Though not with a wall of text like I did ;), so thank you kind reader for getting this far!)
I would say that the thing that can really screw Amazon over the mid and long-term is losing customer trust.
Thanks for the Finance context. I figured they ran numbers and decided to go ahead anyway.
It’s sad that being public also encourages companies to act in ways that aren’t ethical as long as it maximizes shareholder value.
Piracy solves this
It does, though this will also be their excuse just to raise the price of prime in general. Even with their rewards card and 5% back, the “benefit” of prime is getting slim for me. Might be time to cancel prime.
Canceled my sub, dusted off my torrent tracker logins.
Yo ho yer scallwags we sail the high seas🌊🏴☠️🦜
I cancelled Prime as soon as I got this email. It was set to renew in February so perfect timing. I also sent them an email to provide some feedback about the change:
I cancelled my membership as soon as I received notification that you would be including ads to a PAID streaming service. I cannot believe that you think asking for more money per month to have an ad free experience is ok. The world is going to shit because of greedy corporations like you. I hope you go bankrupt and Jeff Bezos goes looking for the Titanic in a poorly made submarine.
Exactly what I did too! Sadly, most Americans would gladly continue paying for their lessened experience. When faced with potentially losing a tiny bit of content, most Americans will gladly pull down their pants.
100% agree. The reason we are in this situation is because people are so fucking complacent. They downplay/justify these shitty practices repeatedly and corporations just get away with worse and worse shit.
Avast! Abandon yonder stream ship, lest those scallywags hornswaggle ye again.
🏴☠️
We are like-minded!
yo ho ho ho ho ho ho ho and a bottle of rum
🦜☠️💀🏴☠️🥃
What a beautiful excuse to drop prime. Unfortunately my own changing of behavior won’t change anyone’s, but hey, at least I guess it’s less money spent monthly.
I never paid for prime. I hate paying for shipping though so I usually wait until I need a couple of things to get over the minimum. I recently ordered a pair of ear buds. They were $34.95 so I added a box of $1 Kraft mac and cheese to avoid paying the $8 for shipping. haha!
You in the US? Amazon.ca doesn’t have a “buy this much for free shipping” option as far as I know.
that looks to be almost all steaming services adding an ad-supported option, you now pay to not have ads.
Back to the high sea’s to watch anything then
Yo ho ho, shiver me timbers, what a crew the Jolly Roger is getting
Edit: ignore this. They actually do offer an adfree sub
But Amazon is not doing this. They show ads on the one subscription they have, that they already recently have raised the price for. This is higher price for lower quality and no option to upgrade or downgrade. They leave you the option to stay or leave
It says in the email that you can pay extra for ad free.
Sorry. I missed that
Greedy pigs, they can’t help themselves anymore. I swear it went up 20 or 30% in the last year or two, and now this. Does anyone have recommendations on where to find stuff if you are tech stupid with no computer (only a Roku TV and android phone)?
Stremio is nice.
It “allows” them
to invest in compelling contentto make more money from the same service.
