Amazon Prime Video Gets “Limited Advertisements” on January 29

Amazon today alerted its Prime Video customers in the U.S. that its move to displaying “limited advertisements” in shows and movies will begin in about a month.

“We are writing to you today about an upcoming change to your Prime Video experience,” the email explains. “Starting January 29, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership.”

Amazon warned of this change in September but said only that it would begin in early 2024 at the time. It also said that it would offer a $2.99 per month add-on to remove those ads, and promised that it would not raise the prices of Amazon Prime (which includes Prime Video) or the standalone Prime Video subscription (which costs $8.99 per month in the U.S.) in 2024. Today’s email doesn’t mention the no price hike pledge, but it confirms the new ad-free option, which Prime members can opt-into here.

Given the past year of horrific price increases across many consumer subscription services, I know that some will be outraged by this shift. But Prime Video is relatively inexpensive. And Amazon is perhaps unique in that they can accurately claim that the broader Prime subscription, at least, is still a tremendous value with an astonishing array of digital and physical perks that include a strong and growing range of exclusive Prime Video content, free shipping on over 300 million physical items, access to exclusive deals and sales events like Prime Day, 100 million ad-free songs via Amazon Music, unlimited photos storage via Amazon Photos, various Prime Gaming benefits, over 3,000 books via Prime Reading, a free one-year GrubHub+ membership valued at $120, and a lot more.