Comment by MattRix
3 hours ago
it is nice that if you pay enough you can avoid ads, but they are definitely coming to all the lower price tiers… and the premium tiers will of course get more expensive over time
3 hours ago
it is nice that if you pay enough you can avoid ads, but they are definitely coming to all the lower price tiers… and the premium tiers will of course get more expensive over time
At some point, the market will no longer be able to bear premium price hikes, and they'll just shove in ads instead - exactly as happened with cable.
There is a difference between a streaming platform and cable. Streaming platforms are on demand while cable is broadcast.
To have an ads/no ads option with cable, you need 2 distinct channels with different programming, as you need something fill what would be the ad breaks. With an on-demand platform, there is no fixed schedule, so you can insert ads at will without having to account for that.
So even if the market for no ads is small, it doesn't cost them much to provide that option, and they just have to price it above how much they get from ads to make a profit. Even the seldom used YouTube Premium is actually quite profitable for Google. Streaming platforms won't miss that opportunity.
HBO never had a tier with ads when it was on cable, it was simply expensive.
Lots of things didn't have ads on the past (basic cable TV for example). Today the model has changed to being expensive and still collect data/push ads. This isn't a cable vs streaming thing, it's a then vs now thing.
1 reply →
That was 80s Reagan/conservative American. Those folks weren't as greedy as modern day companies and they cared about their product/experience, whereas nowadays caring about that is outsourced (see the Mad Men mess) and greed is king.
It's wild to long for the day of 'caring', 'sane', Reagan era corporate 'governance'.
1 reply →
My understanding is that they already make more money on the ad tiers.
(So the price increases are about finding the revenue maximizing price for the ad free tiers, not about overall profit)
...and piracy will once again become rampant!
Where's the amazon prime tier where I don't get ads?
As far as I can tell there isn't one. Even when you pay extra for no ads the interface itself is infested with them. A truly ad free amazon prime tier wouldn't constantly push shows and movies you that you have to pay for on top of the higher monthly fee you're already paying for or show ads for shows and movies on other platforms.
They're clever with that, by offering subscriptions to various producers and other streaming platforms within Amazon Prime video UI. The Amazon subscription is very cheap, but then you end up sub-subscribing to SkyShowtime and MGM and Apple Video to get access to your favorite space shows, and suddenly it's cable 2.0.
Wouldn't be so bad if the player didn't suck. You'd think video streaming chrome would be a solved problem by now, but it's not, and somehow we're regressing on this front.
It is called: Prime Video Ad Free
Go to the Prime Video website, or check your settings in Prime Video on your device.
I have lived a video ad free life for decades. I am convinced video ads do bad things to our brains. In aggregate, beyond any individual impact they may or may not have.
Ad blockers, ad free YouTube, Kagi, … whatever it takes.
Two to five years ago. :P depending on how you feel about their cross-promotions (which are ads, but at least aren't inserted into the content)
[dead]