Good! In the US ads were added after telling Prime members they’d get ad free content as part of their membership. I complained about this during a meeting (I worked on Prime during the Prime Video launch), but was shot down because the ads were pre-roll trailers for Amazon produced content. Of course that turned into just ads, everywhere. I’m glad the court saw it for what it was: bait and switch.
Yeah, ever since that change happened, I haven't logged into Prime Video. I'm paying money for a product, I shouldn't have to put up with ads too.
I understand that it's not free to produce TV shows, no free lunches and whatnot, so I understand why stuff I watch for free has ads, but if I'm paying for something I draw a line that I don't want my shit interrupted by advertisement.
It really annoyed me that Prime decided that they would just impose ads on me unless I pay them an additional $4 a month. I already pay for Prime, I already buy many products on Amazon, I don't want to pay an extra $50 a year just to watch your mediocre shows without you trying to indoctrinate me to buy more shit.
On a fundamental level you're absolutely right. Unfortunately, you're complaining about a model that has existed for decades at this point: the cable model. You pay an arm and a leg for cable, and yet you get ads.
Companies seem incapable of imagining a world where they don't double dip, since they've built the whole house of cards on the cable model and they want nothing else than to recreate it.
Cable still has one thing going for it: it tends to be cheaper for sports. Watching hockey games online requires subscriptions to 3 different streaming services just to follow a single local team, which is ridiculous.
I am glad to hear that there was someone who argued for the right course of action in the Amazon Prime organization. I don't know why this is not being fought by other regulators. I also paid for Amazon Prime, expecting to get ad-free content, and then they started to add advertisements. This may not be fraud, but it is definitely lowering my opinion of Amazon.
Amazon seems cool with selling fake fuses that will kill people. That is what got me to stop shopping with them. The fact they seem to be cool with literally just letting people die. Fuses aren't an 'optional if they work' thing.
What's infuriating is that Amazon has finally announced they're getting rid of co-mingling and have never had to massively pay for their misguided policy that has killed people.
When you start a subscription, you're agreeing to pay X amount every Y period of time; you're not starting a new agreement every single Y period of time.
They can cancel the prior tier or bump up the price on renewal though. This is the problem with subscriptions, you become complacent and accept incremental changes until you finally notice that you’re being rinsed.
And actually some subscriptions can include unilateral price increases in the contract (a subscription is a contract) with early termination fees. It just isn’t commonly done because word gets around and you will lose business. You typically only see this in predatory industries where there are few alternatives and the service is necessary, like local waste management.
If the contract is unfair enough you can usually escape it in court or arbitration, but nobody wants to go through that.
They can cancel the subscription if you don't agree to the new proposition after they fulfilled their contract. But they can't just change the terms of the agreement after it was made.
But doing so would mean risking to loose customers who were just too lazy to cancel. So most Businesses don't like it. (Spotify did cancel their old contracts though, for people who had not agreed with the recent price hike)
I think your question is reasonable, but no, I do not think a company gets to promote a service as having no ads as part of the sell, and then put ads in by default.
Not the person you're replying to, but it just feels like rent-seeking. Amazon is already a gigantic corporation, pretty much everyone spends lots and lots of money on Amazon, it just felt like a way to try and squeeze more money out of their existing customers.
ETA:
I mean, I'm sure there is some exception to this, but generally speaking everyone hates ads. Part of the reason that the whole "cable cutting" thing happened was because everyone hated paying a lot of money to some cable company just to be bombarded with advertisements. At least that's a big reason as to why I did it.
Now all these media companies realized that they can start shoving ads at us again and people will keep paying.
Obviously I'm not entitled to having media at a specific price indefinitely, but I'm perfectly allowed to not like it when companies engage in rent-seeking bullshit.
It wouldn't bother me as much if you could still buy media, but as far as I can tell most TV shows don't get Blu-ray releases anymore. The media companies realized that it's more profitable for them to make you pay for the same media forever instead of a lump cost, I guess preferably with you watching corporate brainwashing to buy products.
I suspect once the heat on this settles down, every streaming service is going to start forcing ads on us at all times, and then the only way to fight back on this will be bittorrent.
Or just stop watching. I seem to be out of tune with what people want in a TV show nowadays, I don't find much enjoyable. I accept there was never that much, but given how much content is produced now I would have expected more in my sweet spot.
That was the point that made me remove Amazon from my life. Obviously it was building up but kudos to Amazon for being the one to push me over the line to quit up Amazon.
The irony of Amazon “empty chair in meetings” myth. When you don’t even listen actual people advocating for customers why’d you care about an imaginary person.
I don't like it but could almost understand ad before content.
But what I don't understand and find the most stupid is when you are forced to watch ad for the internal content. It gives me an aweful experience instead of pushing me to watch more. So makes me want to stop using the service.
The worst offender is Disney+, not only the app is the shitiest one with great pain to seek in content, but you have systematic 30 or 40s long as for content of the platform you don't care like the last woke show. The worst of the worst in that case is that they will not care to show you 100 times the exact same ad as for the same movie or show sometimes.
It has no good effect except totally wasting your time and frustrating you!
It should also be illegal to have ads in the Amazon marketplace (where we pay to buy products), Google/apple app store (where people already paid for a phone), Uber ride, and basically anywhere we have already paid to use something.
If this is not stopped, there's no limit, your car, TV, fridge, it will be everywhere, and it pumps more and more income away from people and products/service providers into advertisers' pockets.
It really should be illegal. Companies aren't going to do it themselves as it is a huge potential revenue stream.
So much so that it effectively has become the main focus of some companies who we as consumers still perceive as online stores/marketplaces. Specifically sponsored search results apparently can become a bigger income stream than the one from actual sales themselves.
Which is great for these companies, terrible for us consumers.
It's one thing to enforce contracts but another for government to dictate how private platforms monetize their own property. If ads make the service worse, the answer is competition and exit, not government bans. No one is forcing you to use these platforms.
I have always disliked ads, but this has slowly grown into outright unreasonable anger as the years go. I just cancel anything I'm paying for that shows intrusive ads.
I was a little worried about cancelling Amazon Prime at first, but realized I didn't -really- need some JIXFOZ branded gadgets next day, after all.
I plead with everyone who feels similarly to vote with their feet/wallet. It's the only hope of getting out of this mess.
> cancelling Amazon Prime at first, but realized I didn't -really- need some JIXFOZ branded gadgets next day, after all.
The problem with cancelling Prime is the unrelenting haranguing to re-sign up and the clearly punitive delivery charges. You get adverts from cancelling due to adverts and end up paying more.
I’ve just started to focus my purchases at specialist UK stores, rather than defaulting to Amazon for everything.
The delivery fees are a good thing. I end up with less impulse purchases when I have to bookmark my wants until I have a pooled enough for free delivery. Turns out I don't need that many things after all.
if you're based in germany and have had prime before february 5th, 2024, you might be eligible for compensation. here is the page of the consumer rights commitee where you can take part (don't fret if you get physical mail from the federal bureau of justice a few days later): https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/vertraege-reklamat...
I agree with this decision. Now onto the other problem... Why are you selling me a subscription which doesn't give you access to most of the content on your site? I was on Amazon Prime recently and most stuff had a padlock on it. Some of it was very old, i.e. thirty years older or more.
That's a common (but no less frustrating) model, Apple does it that way. Certain things are included in the sub, but you can also purchase things that aren't. At least Apple makes it reasonably easy to filter and find stuff, Amazons UX is a fever dream.
IANAL, but it seems it's a technicality on how the conditions of the contract changed? IIUC they forcibly changed the contract without notice. If they would have sent a notice first and then let the consumers decide whether to get out or move on with the new contact and new conditions, it would have been fine to serve ads. The title seems like a clickbait.
I think it's great that this was challenged, but won't the outcome just be that they switch to use Netflix tactics? They'll increase the Prime fee for existing "no ads" customers (allowed), and offer a lower "with ads" tier?
I wonder if they will also be forced to compensate customers (e.g. by having to pay out the ad revenue to them). I think it's a real possibility; without it, companies have little reason not to try this kind of thing over and over - either they get away with it, or they get away with it temporarily.
I'd say this is a victory for consumers though I suspect Amazon will just raise the prices of Prime by $5/month or whatever people pay "extra" to get rid of ads, and just claim that it's part of the "regulatory environment" in Germany.
Is anyone paying for Prime just for streaming? I always saw it as a nice bonus included with free shipping and all the other discounts you get on Amazon, it breaks even very quickly. It cost half of a Netflix subscription. The content is also half the quality, so it’s not like I would like to pay anything for it anyway. I hate ads as much as anyone, after the ad introductions I just stopped slop watching.
This is good. It upsets me that I am already a Prime member but I still have to pay on top of that. I actually prefer they increase the price but bundle everything in 1 membership.
I paid the additional payment because I hate watching ads and wanted to watch some series without it. Now Amazon Prime Video has made some ads show even while having this additional payment!
I so much hate it that we have built an economy where companies believe the best way forward is to cram ads into everything instead of building better products.
> I so much hate it that we have built an economy where companies believe the best way forward is to cram ads into everything instead of building better products.
Blame the consumers.
They don’t want to pay for monthly subscriptions because “economy is tough”
Or maybe companies turned products that were one-time purchases into monthly subscriptions.
Or companies made it incredibly hard to cancel monthly subscriptions.
Or companies will continue to charge and auto-renew us even when we clearly don't use the product.
Or companies will unilaterally degrade our service or push us to lower tiers in order to better serve customers who aren't you.
Or companies will have us pay a monthly subscription, and then also sell our data to the highest bidder anyway.
Maybe many of these companies have never had our interest at heart, and people are tired of feeling constantly screwed over and seen as a revenue stream instead of customers.
That is neither regulation (just standard contract law) and IMHO a formality, because Amazon could have just formulated it differently: hey we terminate your contract, next offer: same thing with ads (vs. Hey we change the contract for profit).
This is not a structural victory just a badly executed change.
The reason they don't do that is inertia. "Hey we terminate your contract, here's a new worse one" will result in far fewer customers than "lol you got ads now".
Same with a lot of providers simply unilaterally raising prices. Entirely illegal, but they are mostly getting away with it.
All a matter of balance. It can become like that in the wrong hands and often is. Here it is doing something useful. If only they could stop these companies spying as well.
Ending the old contracts and asking people to sign up for new ones risks losing customers who don't particularly care about keeping their subscription but didn't bother to cancel either. Which is why Amazon would prefer to keep the old contracts running and unilaterally change the conditions. Defaults matter.
Exactly. This is a pointless discussion. Just a badly executed legal change. Good that they are reminded that they have to stick to the law, but for consumers practically there is no change.
In an open market, customers should be able to make informed decisions. Lying to customers about your product distorts the market. People may have switched from other services to prime expecting that there would be no ads. That undermines the business of those competitors, and may drive them out so that they are no longer available if you want to switch back.
I understand that it's not free to produce TV shows, no free lunches and whatnot, so I understand why stuff I watch for free has ads, but if I'm paying for something I draw a line that I don't want my shit interrupted by advertisement.
It really annoyed me that Prime decided that they would just impose ads on me unless I pay them an additional $4 a month. I already pay for Prime, I already buy many products on Amazon, I don't want to pay an extra $50 a year just to watch your mediocre shows without you trying to indoctrinate me to buy more shit.
Companies seem incapable of imagining a world where they don't double dip, since they've built the whole house of cards on the cable model and they want nothing else than to recreate it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU
So if they stopped letting you watch their new content because you had an old no ads membership would that be ok?
Remember when Netflix inttroduced ads they added a lower tier to go along with it.
And actually some subscriptions can include unilateral price increases in the contract (a subscription is a contract) with early termination fees. It just isn’t commonly done because word gets around and you will lose business. You typically only see this in predatory industries where there are few alternatives and the service is necessary, like local waste management.
If the contract is unfair enough you can usually escape it in court or arbitration, but nobody wants to go through that.
Also you aren't agreeing to pay to renew the contract. It isn't a rent payment in a structured contract. You can cancel at any time.
But doing so would mean risking to loose customers who were just too lazy to cancel. So most Businesses don't like it. (Spotify did cancel their old contracts though, for people who had not agreed with the recent price hike)
I can't sign a contract with you for $10/month for no ads and then start showing you ads.
ETA:
I mean, I'm sure there is some exception to this, but generally speaking everyone hates ads. Part of the reason that the whole "cable cutting" thing happened was because everyone hated paying a lot of money to some cable company just to be bombarded with advertisements. At least that's a big reason as to why I did it.
Now all these media companies realized that they can start shoving ads at us again and people will keep paying.
Obviously I'm not entitled to having media at a specific price indefinitely, but I'm perfectly allowed to not like it when companies engage in rent-seeking bullshit.
Cynicism aside, I wish there was a happy medium where companies could just _make money_ and not always have to make _even more money_.
I suspect once the heat on this settles down, every streaming service is going to start forcing ads on us at all times, and then the only way to fight back on this will be bittorrent.
We have to educate them again that taking our convenience means them loosing money.
But what I don't understand and find the most stupid is when you are forced to watch ad for the internal content. It gives me an aweful experience instead of pushing me to watch more. So makes me want to stop using the service.
The worst offender is Disney+, not only the app is the shitiest one with great pain to seek in content, but you have systematic 30 or 40s long as for content of the platform you don't care like the last woke show. The worst of the worst in that case is that they will not care to show you 100 times the exact same ad as for the same movie or show sometimes. It has no good effect except totally wasting your time and frustrating you!
And now they simultaneously added ads and raised prices. I haven't dropped the subscription yet but am sure thinking about it.
If this is not stopped, there's no limit, your car, TV, fridge, it will be everywhere, and it pumps more and more income away from people and products/service providers into advertisers' pockets.
So much so that it effectively has become the main focus of some companies who we as consumers still perceive as online stores/marketplaces. Specifically sponsored search results apparently can become a bigger income stream than the one from actual sales themselves.
Which is great for these companies, terrible for us consumers.
yeah I hope I won't ever be shown ads on TV for which I already paid
On channels/services that you might choose to access via the TV? That's a separate matter.
I was a little worried about cancelling Amazon Prime at first, but realized I didn't -really- need some JIXFOZ branded gadgets next day, after all.
I plead with everyone who feels similarly to vote with their feet/wallet. It's the only hope of getting out of this mess.
This is a field that requires regulation to see any difference.
The problem with cancelling Prime is the unrelenting haranguing to re-sign up and the clearly punitive delivery charges. You get adverts from cancelling due to adverts and end up paying more.
I’ve just started to focus my purchases at specialist UK stores, rather than defaulting to Amazon for everything.
Because that is how Amazon adding ads with payment to remove them, to existing customers feels like.
Organised crime neighborhood motto.
Blame the consumers.
They don’t want to pay for monthly subscriptions because “economy is tough”
Maybe many of these companies have never had our interest at heart, and people are tired of feeling constantly screwed over and seen as a revenue stream instead of customers.
The consumer is not a single person, and until we (the consumers) all coordinate, our individual incentive is to not pay (Classical prisoner dilemma).
So "voting with your wallet" doesn't maximize your personal interest.
This is not a structural victory just a badly executed change.
Same with a lot of providers simply unilaterally raising prices. Entirely illegal, but they are mostly getting away with it.
Ah, capitalism, with your endless power imbalance.
In any case, the headline oversells the ruling: it's only about changing the conditions for existing customers.
Amazon can let the old contracts run out and sign up people under a new scheme, that allows them to show ads.
Yes, and that matters in the short run. In the long run, churn is unavoidable.
we got into such a place where we don't encourage competition.