Downstream: Prime Video apologises for ads, doubles down on ads

This month, Amazon has been contacting customers, apologising to annual subscribers for forcing ads into Prime Video with some fairly radical compensation: a full refund of their annual subscription, or a free 12 months of Prime.  

One week after we published that story, a new report emerged from Adweek that suggests Amazon has quietly increased the frequency of ads seen on the service, significantly. 

According to Adweek's reporting, Prime Video's "ad load" has increased from three-and-a-half minutes per hour to four to six minutes per hour since ads launched 18 months ago. 

That might pale in comparison to the roughly 20-minute ad loads of free-to-air but it's still almost double the amount of ads Prime Video subscribers would have seen just a year and a half ago. 

Despite offering refunds and free Prime for the inconvenience of ads, Amazon hasn't contacted customers about the increase. Instead, it seems to have slowly ramped up the amount of ads over the last year and a half without notice.

One could assume that the careful twist of the ad-revenue tap was performed delicately so as not to alarm paying subscribers. 

Prime Video wasn't the first to introduce ads, and it certainly won't be the last. So why has the reaction been so strong? 

One key difference is the rollout of ads. Providers like Netflix offered subscribers the opportunity to save on their monthly bill by introducing a cheaper ad-supported plan (before cutting the next-most affordable plan) whereas Prime Video forced ad breaks onto every paying subscriber overnight. That's going to ruffle some feathers. 

Then there's the sheer intrusiveness of Prime Video's ad breaks. 

As a subscriber to ad-supported Prime Video, I already thought the ads were horrendous. It's not so much the frequency, but the placement and careless timing. Like getting an ad break minutes from the end of Invincible's season 3 finale, smack-bang in the middle of the climactic showdown. 

To be clear, I don't want to pay for ads at all. Streaming and Pay TV dismantled the free-to-air television model by promising an on-demand, ad-free experience but over the last ten years (more if you count Foxtel), these services have been finding ways to feed paying subscribers more and more advertisements. Not only that but asking customers for more and more money if they want to avoid ads.

With such aggressive price hikes in the streaming space, it's becoming more and more obvious that a paying customer with ads is worth more to companies like Amazon than a premium customer without ads.