> I will gladly suffer the inconvenience of buying stuff from other retailers in the future
Tried it and failed. Higher prices, costly 5 day "express" shipping and questionable / non-existent return policies - the time and effort required to wade through is not worth it.
I want to not use Amazon too - but other retailers make it really really hard.
What are you buying that you experience this? Household goods from target (bonus probably not fake), electronics Best Buy and B&H, Costco for a lot of misc, and clothing from old navy and h&m etc. all have easy returns and often better prices than I see at Amazon (even for books oddly — Target must track Amazon prices to the penny).
UK, last thing I bought was a pack of AA batteries (I wanted the lithium ones) - £2 cheaper than all the supermarkets, electronics retailers etc. Nearest in price online was £1 more and £3.99 shipping.
Can't speak for the rest of the UK -- would appreciate some knowledge here! -- but in London, Amazon's shipping is rarely faster, and, in fact, overnight shipping from anywhere else is generally only £2-3 -- if it's even required, because often shipping is 1-2 days for free.
Honestly, though, I'll happily pay a few quid extra to Argos just to avoid Amazon. (Is Sainsbury's perfect? No. Are they less detrimental to society than Amazon? Yes.) I recognise not everyone has this privilege, though.
It's less about what and more about where. For example, in European countries Amazon pricing and (often) return policies are distinctly better than most.
In Germany, for instance, I don't think you can get Prime Video without the full Amazon Prime subscription. In countries where the shipping benefit is more costly (like the US) they may offer different membership tiers.
While this is true, Netflix hiked prices massively over the years. Their 4K/HDR offering is 17.99 EUR per month here. Amazon Prime including Prime Video is still 8.99 EUR/month, cheaper if paid yearly, without any surcharge for 4K/HDR. So that's more than twice the price for a comparable streaming service.
I just recalled that Amazon increased the price slightly last year when they launched Rings of Power.
Typically I subscribe to these services for just a few months at a time, depending on what's interesting. Harder to do with accounts that are shared by a larger household, I guess.
> We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* for U.S. Prime members and will share pricing for other countries at a later date.
The whole point of me paying is to make it easier for me. If you’re going to fuck me over even more for paying then I’ll just go hack to pirating 4k rips of the content for free.
When I was paying for Netflix, I still found it easier to download the shows I was interested in watching as this permitted me to remember my place, dodge their shitty player UI, and not deal with crappy internet problems causing the stream to change to potato quality at random moments.
Most of these problems aren't a thing with physical media. Honestly I want to pay for content to support the creators, but that's what I want to pay for. I'm not paying to use your shitty player app and I'm not paying for draconian DRM that lets you take the content away from me later, or restrict the devices I can play the content on, or tell me I can't watch my movie on a flight with no wifi, etc. The payment is on my honor, because the content is frankly stupidly simple to access for absolutely free if I really want to, and that's not going to change. Data isn't going to get *harder* to copy over time. Just let me pay the artists as directly as possible, because that's where I want the money to go, to support their work. Can we make that a thing?
The main reason I dropped prime is that the shipping stopped working. Two days slipped most of the time.
But what put me over the edge was their music stopped being included, it was another fee to remove adds and unlock everything.
And video had these annoying preroll ads. Frequently for things I already watched.
Now there will be ads throughout and it’s a monthly fee to get what was free.
I do like some prime shows -maisel and peripheral - but those get conveniently packaged up and downloaded through trackers.
The best UI experience for streaming is just torrent files autodownloading and being available the day after. No ads, no confusing interfaces. Id pay for this, but I can’t.
The big issue in my opinion is that movie execs have this misguided belief that if you stop people from pirating your content, every prevented download will turn into a sale at full price.
But I expect that people will simply stop watching mediocre movie and low-effort series. Or wait for rebates, like those people who avoid cinema and then rent the bluray later. As a result of this misunderstanding, they try technical solutions and the effect is that probably every 2nd person who reads this has Sonar setup to fuel their "web-dl subscription" to Prime. The correct solution would be to lower prices (and that somewhat includes less ads) to make it more attractive to pay for that content. And they will need that strategy anyway to survive a direct competition with Disney = the Marvel cinematic universe.
I myself cancelled Netflix when I noticed that none of the people I talk to regularly care enough about their Netflix shows to remember the story... And from that I concluded that it must be mostly filler content.
That applies to me. I rotate some of my streaming subscriptions are shows/movies release. Peacock, HBO, Netflix all are monthly and I turn them off periodically.
I haven't used Amazon for years but it's amazing they were able to include all of the things you mentioned for the price. Fast Shipping, video, music.
But the only way I can look at it is the consumer benefits while the rest are either subsidized or screwed over. Fulfillment workers are in horrible conditions, musicians make nothing on their music, and filmmakers lose their royalities and pay and increasingly become a sort of gig worker.
As James Stephanie Sterling likes to say:
"Corporations don't want some [of your] money, they want ALL [of your] money."
Also, ads are (except for very, very rare exceptions) useless wastes of time AND if I'm already paying for the service which doesn't get any better but just more "expensive" through garbage like this, the term "enshittification" most certainly does apply.
Edit: Also, like Netflix, Amazon also artificially limit streaming quality to <= 720p just because I don't use Microsoft's spyware system. Fuck 'em.
History repeats itself. I'm old enough to remember when "Cable TV" meant "no advertisements." And then it was just a few between programs. Then during the program, which eventually made it indistinguishable from "over the air" (antenna/aerial) broadcasting. Now Netflix, and Amazon repeat the lesson for another generation of consumer.
> I'm old enough to remember when "Cable TV" meant "no advertisements."
You must be infinitely old then, because "Cable TV" at its inception had ads. Cable TV was originally just bundling all the local stations, and it was like that for thirty years. So the first thirty years of cable had ads. Even most of the first few cable-only TV stations had ads. The second cable-only TV station, WTBS, had ads. Nickelodeon, ESPN, CNN, USA, all had ads from their start and were some of the very first cable-only TV stations.
Interesting how every subscription business is slowly turning to the traditional ad-supported model. People might refuse it, but ad-supported is one of the most efficient business models on both the consumer side and business side. Allows more customers to access a service, for free, with the same quality. Plus, every company needs marketing, and even consumers need it. It allows us to notice things we might need in our lives. Not sure why people thought that the subscription model was going to take over. Imagine having to pay for every single service/website we use daily
Interesting in that once consumers get a taste of an ad-free platform, forever will they wish to return. Ads may be the only way media content as a business makes any money but this really is more telling of where Prime is today. They are losing money. I refuse to watch ads. I block them on all my devices. I don’t watch networks and content that has them. I’ve had a taste of an ad free world and I will do everything in my power to return. If I have a need for something, I’ll research. I would rather go back to pirating content than $20/mo for “limited ads”. It’s fucking Cable all over again.
>Allows more customers to access a service, for free, with the same quality.
But prime's not free. Also the video quality is terrible.
>Imagine having to pay for every single service/website we use daily
Then that's their fault for having an untenable business model, not the user's fault for expecting the free service to remain free.
Anyways, in the AI age user generated content has an intrinsic value as training material so submitting posts to social media sites is basically a transaction.
> and even consumers need it. It allows us to notice things we might need in our lives
Just so I'm clear, are you actually trying to say that ads are good for viewers? Do you personally like ads? Do you use an ad blocker? Are you happy when you see an unskippable 15 second tax on your time?
Except Amazon Prime continues to be a paid service. I quickly stopped watching prime because they already had excessive advertising, I can only imagine how much worse the service is becoming.
It's only more efficient in screwing over the customer, you are paying the same amount for less of the video you want to watch.
It's a shame really, my family had Sky TV about a decade ago and it always baffled me how you pay for the extra channels and then they still have ad breaks.
> Ad-supported is one of the most efficient business models on both the consumer side and business side.
I'm not sure about that. Detach Prime Video from Amazon, Youtube from Google, Hulu from Disney and then maybe we'd see. As it is, these services all look like loss leaders.
> Imagine having to pay for every single service/website we use daily
I'd love to. If we lived in a world where micro-transactions were simple and inexpensive I would love to pay (how much it costs to serve me my content)+(20% overhead for profit). At least my money would be going to the publisher.
There were/are a few companies out there that, for a monthly subscription price, give you paywalled content. They sucked because they were selective about that content, but the idea of paying a clearing house a monthly fee, and having a piece of JS on _everybody's_ site that recognized me and provided the content with no ads and no tracking actually makes me want to take off my tin-foil hat and embrace the internet panopticon.
There's a necessity in society for some form of advertising. People and businesses want to communicate what products and services are available. If a random person wants the ability to start their own business, they're going to need the ability to advertise that they have a new product that they want people to try. Or they want to advertise that there's some societal issue that they want people to be aware of.
Consider a world with zero ads. There wouldn't be annoying interruptions. But we also wouldn't ever learn which new movies are playing, which political candidates are running, etc, except from 2nd and 3rd hand sources with several layers of spin (and misunderstanding/misinformation) on the information.
I personally hate the current state of direct advertising. There seems to be zero prevention of fraud and zero work towards making ads less annoying. I wish that consensual forms of media could convey all that information instead, in an unbiased, informed, and timely manner. Unfortunately that isn't currently happening for several reasons (media underfunding, editorial conflicts of interest, personalized content streams that preclude any sort of unexpected news).
I'm not sure what the solution is overall. I think if every company didn't deliver absolute buckets of trash to their own email marketing lists, then we wouldn't block them and they wouldn't have to pay to ruin our other media.
You mean how do I find cinemas that are local to me? (Or streaming services, I guess). Again, pull. Search engines. Various categories of information broker.
What I'm pushing back against is the idea that advertising is necessary for society to function. I'm defining advertising in the broadest sense I can for the purposes of the thought experiment - information that you pay to have put in front of people. It can be entirely replaced by information that I pay to access.
It always will exist of course, because the incentives of a seller aren't aligned with mine, but it isn't necessary.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you asking how someone who has never heard of the idea of a movie will find out what movie releases are upcoming? Is that really the sort of outlier we want to structure our society around?
Most of the movies I've seen were because of a poster hung someplace or a trailer playing before a movie at the theater or something sparked an interest in seeing it. Movie posters hanging on the wall are a form of advertising. If we didn't allow movie posters to be hung or trailers to be played I would have not known about a lot of movies I've enjoyed over the years.
Are you sure you wouldn't have? If you knew you like watching movies and knew that the way to find out what movies were coming out was to ask rather than have them plastered all over everything, would you really never have done so?
I definitely would have missed a ton of movies that I just would have never known existed.
Since having kids, I don't go to movie theaters very often. Since I don't go to theaters, I don't see the displays hyping new movies, I don't see the posters there, I don't see the trailers. I don't watch regular TV so I don't get many ads. If you were to ask me for 5 sci-fi movies that came out recently several years ago, I'd be able to easily tell you some that I at least wanted to see, if I hadn't already seen them. These days? I couldn't tell you two in the last two years. I still like movies, I'm just no longer passively surrounded by movie-info, so I don't get any of that info.
And so yeah, I'm absolutely certain I've so far missed out on many movies that I probably would have enjoyed, I just never knew they existed, largely because I haven't been exposed to any advertising of those movies. Movies that I would have known about, had I been subjected to ads for them.
I'm currently living in that world of needing to pull up the cinema's website to know what movies are out there, and I absolutely know far less about movies I'd like to see. Because I'm not going to just pull up the cinema's website every few days to see what movies are currently out there just to see "nope nothing I'm interested in", its a lot easier when the information comes to me.
I fully agree, not all advertising is good, a lot is actively harmful! But at the same time, advertising can be useful, even as the consumer.
If I only know about what movies are coming out is by asking the cinema, I'm probably going to miss out on a lot of movies I'll probably enjoy, unless I make quite the habit of asking the cinema on a very regular basis.
So you're subscribed to their marketing letter, aka getting their ads. Still a "push" action. That's fine and I think that's good advertising.
And I think that's the case because that's my life experience, today. I know far less about movies playing at the theater because I'm at the theater less for other reasons. I don't see all the trailers and posters and displays for upcoming movies, I don't get that information thrown at me anymore, so I don't know any of it.
I didn't used to have to try to find movies I'd like. Now I do. Why? Because I consume fewer ads.
The best concert I ever saw (Nightmares on Wax) was one I only knew was going to be in town from a TV commercial. I don't follow concert news.
I realized recently that I only ever see blockbuster movies anymore because I've hardcore eliminated advertising from my life. I don't know what movies are coming out anymore if they're not huge and mainstream. That's kind of a bummer. Movie trailers were one kind of commercial I did like.
Advertising mostly sucks, yes, but like all takes you can be too extremist about it. Sometimes an advertiser's interests align with mine. Maybe I should know the full range of products and services available. I'm not going to forget that the advertiser's message is biased.
By blocking all advertising from my life I've introduced a different kind of bias into my choices.
And yes, this one is a great example of how you can turn your paying customers into being the product that you sell (in addition to charging them) to satisfy your greed.
The entire tech industry is going through some massive enshittification. This ads nonsense is everywhere now. Why the f should anyone pay for a subscription if they are going to be shown some ads?
Old man yelling at clouds here. These same arguments were brought up with cable TV back in the day; one of the benefits of cable TV, we were told, was there wouldn't be any ads since we were paying for it.
Who told you that? Cable TV had ads on practically every channel for the first 30 years of its history, since it was just collecting and transmitting all the local broadcast stations. And even when cable-only stations came out, they often had ads. The second cable-only TV station, TBS, had ads from day one!
HBO was an outlier because it didn't have ads. It wasn't the norm.
I pre-date cable TV. There was a debate amongst the adults whether the community should allow cable TV in, given the infrastructure and tax costs involved.
Cable started in the 1950s, just so you know about pre-dating cable TV. And for the first 30 years there were no cable-only stations. So you'd then know, there were ads on cable from the start, so I don't get why you have this "we were told there would be no ads", since you saw for thirty years there were ads on it.
After many years as a subscriber this really brings the value of Amazon Prime into question for me. I no longer order enough stuff from them to make it worthwhile. I do use Prime Reading but the quality is mostly poor, "landfill crime" genre.
Such a compromised video service would quite likely push me out - I just won't watch ads on a service I pay for.
I get ads all the time every time I walk into the library. Curated displays showcasing whatever author or topic they're trying to push at the time. Is that not advertising?
Not that I mind. I often find neat things in these displays that I might not have thought to look for otherwise. But isn't that kind of the point of ads, to get people to look for things they might not have otherwise known or considered?
You have to wonder as a species if we have too much entertainment, all the endless tv shows, movies, it's hyper production of mostly forgettable noise and variations on the same few recycled themes. Instead we might be better of with less but better quality content or turn to various activities and socializing for fun.
I do agree with the broad premise that we have a glut of content. AI is only going to make it worse.
The problem with your argument is that most people love the mostly forgettable noise and variation on the same theme. That's why there are 137 Marvel movies which were all huge hits, 42 different Star Wars productions going on right now, and Gordon Ramsey has 13 simultaneous shows. (Warning: made up numbers).
Most people don't want to think when they watch movies. They don't want high concept indie flicks. That's why Netflix and Amazon are huge and Mubi and Criterion Channel aren't.
The streaming bait and switch is another example of Silicon Valley 'disrupting' entertainment by ignoring its history, and then throwing ads back in claiming there was no other way.
The arts have only ever flourished under formal systems of patronage; the need for immediate commercial viability is what has led us to a landscape of every service offering 10 comic book/fantasy novel adaptations for every 1 original screenplay.
Indeed. Even Amazon third-party has good deals on used discs. I miss FamilyVideo who had tons of rental discs for sale for $2-$5 during sales and $5-10 normally.
Welp, it was a good run, I guess. I'd been considering dumping Prime as I've been using the other benefits less and less the past few years. This will be the final straw for me. Goodbye, worst streaming UI on the planet!
So, to avoid ads, I should to spend another $2.99 a month? But also all of the writers are on strike, so I’m not gonna see any new content for at least six months? Cool cool. That makes sense.
It used to be good old shows or movies which cable viewers used to or may still watch more of. I never watched anything on it. Terrible UI.
Then, they started making more shows and movies that were good so I watched them. The pre-roll advertisements started but were skippable annoyances.
Now ad supported platforms are mixed in with prime content unless you select prime only. UI is bad again. Movies/shows stop in the middle while the app is loading ads or something. The content hasn’t improved much and the “new” section is back to old shows and movies. Back to not watching again.
Idk 1-2 day shipping would change for me since the distribution center is closer than the grocery store.
I don’t think the three times I needed overnight shipping and two actually went through are worth the yearly charge. Two day shipping gets rescheduled often also.
I think I depends how the show is license. Prime video (the app) has content from other sources that have ads. But shows licensed directly by Prime don’t have ads. Or something like that.
Netflix added a new lower-priced ad-supported option, leaving existing subscribers as they were.
Amazon however is pushing ads onto existing subscribers and adding a new ad-free option to which one has to upgrade.
This burns a lot of goodwill. It just ain't nice. I will be cancelling the subscription once this hits my country as a matter of principle.