Amazon Sued over Prime Video Ads: Class-Action Suit Alleges Deception

https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/amazon-prime-video-ads-lawsuit-class-action-1235910694/

by speckx • 2 years ago

173 147 2 years ago

  “But last month, Amazon changed the deal. To stream movies and TV shows without ads, Amazon customers must now pay an additional $2.99 per month… This is not fair, because these subscribers already paid for the ad-free version; these subscribers should not have to pay an additional $2.99/month for something that they already paid for.”

Seems like a pretty solid case where they altered the deal in the midst of a one year Prime contract. I look forward to the eventual $.32 settlement I receive.

johnnyo4• 2 years ago

The article mentions the ads are expected to bring in $3 billion annually.

Even if the lawsuit is successful, I suspect it will cost Amazon much less than what they are projecting to make.

diggan• 2 years ago

Even if the lawsuit is successful, I suspect it will cost Amazon much less than what they are projecting to make.

What's the point then? It appears only lawyers stand to gain from this, as usual.

As soon as fines and legal infractions are viewed merely as the 'cost of doing business', enforcing regulations becomes futile. At that point, might as well transition to a 'free for all' market rather than maintain a faux judicial system.

thomastjeffery6• 2 years ago

Users are also harmed by watching the ads. It would be reasonable to calculate the value of each viewed ad as part of the compensation that is sought by a class-action.

dangus• 2 years ago

This is exactly what I was going to say. Prime is sold as an annual purchase, and they didn’t structure the deal so that it would kick the ads in when your current term expires.

init2null• 2 years ago

Best case is that they'll be forced to let us cancel with a partial refund. This is a worthy lawsuit for that reason.

mikestew• 2 years ago

"Forced"? You can already cancel Prime, and get a pro-rated refund.

silisili2• 2 years ago

I cannot believe they didn't roll this out as some feature flag based on account signup/renew date, and instead just told all paid members they're now being downgraded(remember, it's not just ads, it's lower quality).

eitally• 2 years ago

No matter what people think about the products Google has built, they absolutely did handled the subscription, grandfathering and later deprecation of Google Play Music to Youtube Music, and Youtube -> Youtube Red -> Youtube Premium. A subscriber may have lost features, but they definitely did not get upcharged as part of a transition, and only later did Google start raising rates -- separate from forced functional subscription changes.

maximus-decimus• 2 years ago

it's not just ads, it's lower quality

I didn't know that. I watched an old movie the other day (Whisper 2007). It looked like complete shit and found that strange.

jmward01• 2 years ago

Somewhere in the prime TOS we have agreed to this and likely much worse. I paused my subscription, not that that will mean anything to them. This lawsuit was inevitable and will change absolutely nothing no matter the outcome. The meaningful change we need is actual consumer advocacy and invalidating predatory TOS clauses. It isn't possible to live in the modern world without accepting the ridiculous and predatory TOS attached to everything and that isn't right.

vidanay• 2 years ago

The lawsuits and settlement budgets were all figured in to their anticipated costs to make this change.

danaris• 2 years ago

It's already been established (at least in some jurisdictions...? unclear on the details, I'm afraid) that terms in agreements like a TOS that are too far beyond the pale can, at least, be ruled unconscionable.

apwell233• 2 years ago

I look forward to the eventual $.32 settlement I receive.

Do you know why amount is always ridiculously low. Are these lawsuits primarly for the lawyers to make a buck, I dont see how anyone else would be motivated otherwise.

nickff• 2 years ago

They have a low chance of success in court, and are a relatively expensive proposition for the plaintiff lawyers pursuing them. As such, the lawyers are happy to take a generous (to them) settlement before the case gets too far. On the opposite side, it helps the company avoid expensive discoveries, low-probability but possibly very expensive judgements, and gets rid of the need to keep investors informed about nuisance suits.

Turing_Machine• 2 years ago

That's certainly the usual case, but not always. I recall one Facebook class action check I got that was in the $250 range.

kmeisthax• 2 years ago

The way a class action lawsuit works is this:

You, Big Business Co, do something that injures a bunch of people for a small amount. A lawyer files a lawsuit on behalf of a purported class - i.e. "Everyone Bezos Hurt vs. Amazon". There's a whole thing about class certification and other things I don't have time to get into, but let's say the judge agrees that this is a class whose harms can be adjudicated together.

At some point, if you actually have a claim, Amazon wants to pay money for it to go away. This is an accepted part of the legal system, because US courts are adversarial courts[0]. The judge is just the referee. That means that if the plaintiff and defendant agree to take their business elsewhere, the judge can't get involved and continue to prosecute a dead case[1].

First problem: lawyers don't work for free. In fact, pretty much all of them are in massive amounts of student debt until their 40s and 50s, because their ability to command insane amounts of money for their services is priced into the cost of their education. Normally, a lawyer either gets paid by their client, or the client agrees to the lawyer taking a percentage cut of the damage award if one were to exist. Problem is, there's no client yet - we're suing on behalf of an abstract group of people that may or may not want to be involved in the case.

Second problem: we don't know who's a member of the class, or even how many people are a member of it. Settlement agreements typically involve cash payments of a fixed amount. You have to divvy that fixed amount up to an unknown number of people.

So as a result every class action settlement works like this: first, the lawyer gets a cut of the settlement, then the class splits it up however many ways. People have to respond to a settlement offer in order to be included in the class. If more people sign up than we have money for, however, then the class members are diluted. Amazon's liability does not increase just because they harmed more people than they thought.

This is, effectively, a weird kind of double protection racket, in which the person shaking Amazon down for money is also taking money from Amazon to shake them down for less so the mob (us) doesn't get as much. All of it is enabled by fairly understandable and straightforward rules being chained together to arrive at a terrible result.

[0] The opposite of this is inquisitorial courts. Inquisitorial as in NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!

[1] There are certain situations in which a judge can object to a settlement that is unfair to the class, but they can't outright demand the case be brought to trial.

gnicholas• 2 years ago

Of course, the 32¢ compensation will be in the form of an Amazon credit, which can be redeemed on items sold and fulfilled by Amazon.

crazygringo9• 2 years ago

Except that, from all reports online (including someone in these comments), Amazon will cancel your annual Prime subscription and refund all remaining time without any problem. They don't seem to be holding anyone to the contract. (And of course plenty of people subscribe monthly rather than annually as well.)

So I'm not sure there's any case here at all? Since even with annual subscriptions, it seems you can cancel at any time and get a prorated refund.

The fact is, online subscription services change their benefits/features all the time. And companies seem to handle it two ways: grandfather existing customers for the rest of their subscription period, or offer prorated refunds for people who want to cancel. And while the former is definitely going to make customers happier, I think they're both acceptable from a legal standpoint? So I'm not sure this lawsuit has any chance of succeeding at all.

Retric8• 2 years ago

Simply canceling mid contract isn’t a perfect remedy. Consider, should they get to keep the interest on the money they are handing back to you? Obviously not.

Contracts are enforceable because society is much worse off if they aren’t. Imagine if your bank could arbitrarily cancel a car loan and ask for the outstanding balance back at any time simple because they felt like it.

cma• 2 years ago

Can you finance monthly payments on a new Fire TV from Amazon and then midway through just quit paying: but to keep it from being a tort in the same way, let them have you send it back if they want it. And they have to go through your confusing UI or wait on hold for 40 minutes to request you send it back, but you don't pay any more either way.

blibble• 2 years ago

the commitment for both parties was 12 months

presumably they wouldn't like it if I unilaterally decided to say, pay them $7/month instead of $8.99/month halfway through the commitment

how is it acceptable the other way round?

if they don't want to provide the service that was committed to they should refund the entire purchase amount (not just pro-rata)

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

Assuming a settlment is reached, it would probably require Amazon to stop their practice of charging additional fees in exchange for not harassing customers with ads. That latest internet meme from Cory Doctorow labels this particular form of bait-and-switch as "enshittification".

Perhaps the plaintiffs get only a dainty payout as a result of a settlement, but their lawyers will make some decent coin, and that provides the motivation to work to prove Amazon is breaking the law.

How much ad revenue does Amazon make per Prime customer on average. Is it more or less than $2.99/month. We might find out the answer to questions like these during discovery. IIRC, in past litigation we learned that Google makes about $5.50/month per user from ads.

What is the alternative. Plaintiffs could finance their own lawsuits against Amazon. Perhaps they could recover more than $.32. But how much would they have to spend on legal fees and costs to reach a settlement. Chances are, Mr. Napoleon and the other plaintiffs are not paying anything.

People who do not appreciate being harassed by ads by Amazon can engage lawyers to work for them "for free" to stop Amazon from further harassment. Plus, those people might get a check for $.32.

What's the alternative. Keep getting harassed by Amazon and complain on HN expecting something will change. That sounds even less effective and more ridiculous than class action lawsuits and $.32 settlement checks.

Justsignedup• 2 years ago

This is why companies do this nonsense. The cost is so low, that its just the cost of doing business.

They need an additive punitive damage getting everyone $100.

In any case, sensationalist headlines aside, some lawyer is gonna make a lot of money.

And I'm guessing the case will be settled so we can't just go to small claims court and sue them for 3k each.

drtz5• 2 years ago

Here's where I'd normally complain about how our economic system requires prices to increase while product quality degrades to ensure ever-increasing profits for shareholders.

Instead, I'll complain about commercials: why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-free? Do we actually value our time less than advertisers do?

johnnyo4• 2 years ago

Because it’s more profitable to have something that is paid for AND has ads.

Same thing happened with cable TV when it first came out, it was advertised as ad free. Then it filled up with ads, and the streaming services came along promising no ads. Now the circle is repeating itself.

Here is the NYTimes in 1981 on the topic https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...

TehCorwiz• 2 years ago

Greed is cyclical.

drtz5• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing that NYT article.

...critics say that the use of sponsorship could make cable programmers more vulnerable to censorship or control by advertisers, particularly in light of recent efforts by organizations such as the Moral Majority and its offshoot, the Coalition for Better Television.

40+ years later I think it's pretty clear this was an accurate prediction.

A much-cited - and widely disputed - study by the Benton & Bowles advertising agency found that the public would accept advertising if it meant a reduction or a holding-of-the-line on subscription fees...

This is great until a year later when YoY revenue growth is flat and prices are increased anyway.

apwell233• 2 years ago

Because it’s more profitable to have something that is paid for AND has ads.

how does it work for HBO then.

vel0city• 2 years ago

The article doesn't once say cable TV never had ads; it only says the public had some perception that would be the case. In fact, it even talks about how cable channels were bringing in millions of dollars in ad revenues despite being very small markets at the time.

In reality, cable TV had ads from day one, decades before this article was published. Originally every cable TV station had ads, because they were just retransmissions of broadcast stations which ran ads. The first nation-wide cable TV station had ads, and many of the early cable-only channels (CNN, USA, others) had ads.

neogodless4• 2 years ago

Amazon's market research suggested to them that you (might) value your time enough to pay an extra $3/month to avoid watching ads.

johnnyo4• 2 years ago

More specifically, the total revenue of ads + the people willing to pay $3/month is greater than the revenue lost when people cancel their service due to ads

al_borland3• 2 years ago

Their market research clearly saw me as some kind of anomaly if that’s the case.

If they had simply raised the price of Prime, I would have been mildly annoyed for 30 minutes and moved on with my life, as I had done many times before. Instead, on top of my yearly Prime membership, I was going to get charge a monthly fee… this just hit all the wrong notes for me. It felt so cheap. Here I am paying for a premium service and they are going to nickel and dime me with a monthly charge on top of the yearly one. Not a chance in hell. I cancelled my Prime membership after 15 years over this move and have no regrets.

I hope I’m not alone in that. Prime Video is my least watched steaming service and waiting a few extra days for free shipping hasn’t been a big deal.

When cancelling there was no point where they asked why, which I found interesting.

I am a person who will pay to avoid ads. I have YouTube Premium and pay for the ad free Hulu tier. I also always pay extra to get the Kindle without ads, and pay to remove ads in any app I download within minutes. I even pay for my search engine (Kagi) instead of using Google or DDG. I’m the person they were after, but not like this.

I’m curious how many people they expected to pay for this. A modest price hike for everyone would likely have been more profitable and been mostly ignored by everyone. If they wanted to start breaking down the services to offer cheaper options to people looking for it, they should revamp the whole system. Present the 50 Prime offers and let people pick what they want, or have a few different bundles. Shipping and Videos were basically the only 2 things I used, so everything else was of no value to me.

r00fus• 2 years ago

Greed. That's why. Having a wildly profitable business isn't enough. It has to be as profitable as the market will bear. Pure capitalism.

wilg• 2 years ago

Absolutely, advertisers are big companies who don't really care how much they're spending on ads. Especially big brands, they have no idea how much advertising helps them, and they don't care about the budget that much. They'll absolutely pay more to put an ad in front of you than you think it's worth to remove it. That's the whole thing with ads.

xhrpost• 2 years ago

I'm sure this has been going on for a while but I'm noticing an even bigger obsession with companies manifesting ad inventory locations everywhere possible. Biggest standout recently is Lyft placing large ads in their app while I'm waiting on a ride that I'm paying them for! I too used to think something that was paid for directly with actual money meant no ads but not anymore.

maicro• 2 years ago

One of my favorite examples is LCD screens on gas pumps - yelling at you about various deals in the store, as you're standing there _giving them money for the fuel you're pumping_. Some at least have a mute button...

drtz5• 2 years ago

I think this was just a short reprieve from ads in some spaces as we were adopting new tech, not a norm that is just recently being broken. Cable TV, newspapers, magazines, and even many taxis and municipal buses have had advertisements for decades.

thomastjeffery6• 2 years ago

Monopoly is the best position to implement anti-competitive behavior. Copyright is monopoly. It should be no surprise that Copyright has resulted in anti-competitive behavior.

No one can afford to compete with large media corporations, because Copyright explicitly turns media corporations into monopolies.

robertlagrant6• 2 years ago

Copyright's not monopoly. Do you mean the company that owns a TV show has a "monopoly" on that TV show? That's not what people mean monopoly.

gretch• 2 years ago

why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-free?

We can. You just have to make it first.

This is not a question to ask of others, it a just question you ask yourself. Once you answer it for yourself, then just realize that same answer applies to everyone from their perspective.

drtz5• 2 years ago

We can. You just have to make it first.

But how? I don't have the resources to build something like this on my own. I'm skeptical I could convince many investors to give me money to build something pitched as "just like Prime Video but without the ad revenue" when Amazon has certainly already done market research and determined this is the best path to maximize profit.

Terr_• 2 years ago

We can. You just have to make it first.

They've been made. Repeatedly. They just don't persist.

Our economic system won't let them.

joemaller1• 2 years ago

Advertisers are sort of benevolent here, if not lesser victims.

Google, Facebook and now Amazon realized the big money is in brokering ads. As brokers, they know everything and control everything, exploiting both the viewers and advertisers.

mitthrowaway23• 2 years ago

The problem is that the most lucrative advertising market is to advertise to those people who are willing to pay extra to not see ads. The people who are willing to save money by seeing ads, are also the people who don't have excess discretionary cash that they'd be willing to spend on the products advertisers are advertising to them. This is the paradox that keeps driving this industry around in circles, swallowing its own tail.

rrr_oh_man3• 2 years ago

An excellent point. This is why we can’t have good things in a growth-paradigm economy.

milesvp• 2 years ago

There was an interesting interview with a long timer with google on a podcast I listen to (freakanomics?) where the concept of ads came up. Apparently very early on google did the analysis and found that google search provided something like $50 (can't remember the exact number) of actualizable annual value to a typical user. Which is to say they could charge around $5 monthly and it'd still be worth it for most people to pay. But the ads. They could make way more than $50 per user just during the christmas season alone. And so it was a no brainer for them to go with ads (despite anti ad sentiment being a key part of the papers that led to the creation of google...).

So, to answer your question. I think we do value our time less than advertisers do. Worse, is I suspect your eyeballs becomes more valuable to advertisers the more your willing to pay to not see ads...

dgrin91• 2 years ago

I mean you can, it just costs $3/month more now. Basically any service out there has truly ad free versions if you pay more.

It sucks that the price point keeps getting farther away, but it does exist.

whartung• 2 years ago

It is paid and ad free. You just have to pay the new rate.

Perhaps they should have raised the rate of base Prime, and then offered a lower priced paid w/ads option. But there was probably an issue with the annual holders in that case.

So, instead they lowered the features and now folks can up to the new subscription.

int_19h3• 2 years ago

How long until the current ad-free tier becomes "less ads", and you have to pay even more to get rid of those?

edanm• 2 years ago

Instead, I'll complain about commercials: why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-free? Do we actually value our time less than advertisers do?

Yes, clearly, as revealed by the way most consumers act.

How many people do you know that actually pay for YouTube to get rid of ads? I personally do, and I encourage everyone else to do so, but I assume it's a tiny market.

duped• 2 years ago

our economic system requires prices to increase while product quality degrades to ensure ever-increasing profits for shareholders

Only in the absence of competition. Prices go down all the time while growth remains positive.

why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-free

You can, it just costs more. Ads are a way to make sure that there's a product for more price sensitive customers while keeping revenue high.

The real problem for streamers isn't pricing, it's churn.

thinkingkong• 2 years ago

It doesnt take much of an imagination to understand that amazon knew of the probability of a lawsuit, understands the probability of its success, and did the math on upside. With 3B on the line they can afford the lawyers, the appeals, the penalties, etc.

wrs2• 2 years ago

What burns my cookies is that you pay the extra $3 for “ad-free” service and then Freevee still has ads. I thought Freevee was the way they sneaked in an ad-based service by just branding it differently. Are they going to add another $3 for “ad-free Freevee”?

kennethrc• 2 years ago

... sigh ...

Considering the shows I've liked on FV, one can hope :|

brewdad4• 2 years ago

The ads have always been Freevee's business model. So they might offer an ad-free option at some point but that seems highly unlikely.

wrs2• 2 years ago

Sure, but my point is they’ve just turned Prime into an ad-based business model, so what’s the point of Freevee now? Just merge the two and let me turn off all the ads.

srameshc• 2 years ago

Will that even bother Amazon ? I am sure all the big ones have learned how to settle these Suits.

Johnny555• 2 years ago

I'd rather have them be forced to let me cancel Prime Video and discount my Prime membership by $8.99/month. If they are going to make Prime Video unusable to me by injecting ads, then I don't want to pay for it at all, but I do still want the other Prime benefits.

maxwell• 2 years ago

Seems like whole premise of Prime, and most Apple products for that matter, is to capitalize on the failure to enforce product tying that's illegal under both Sherman and Clayton.

blagie• 2 years ago

... I thought the original premise of Prime was to take goods and services which, under basic economic theory, are more efficient centrally-funded by taxes, and provide those via a private entity. Especially things with zero marginal cost, like movies, music, and TV, should not be sold per-unit, but should be available to everyone and funded by taxes. Prime looked like a private equivalent to that.

If we all pay $3.5B per month (350M people times $10/month), that's enough to give us all the college textbooks, movies, software, and music we might want to use, as well as paying for a lot of transportation infrastructure for rapid shipping.

It seemed like a good model while Amazon was doing that.

Now it looks more like what you said.

Prime looks a lot more antitrusty in the model it's evolving to. I cancelled Prime about six months back, and Amazon is just obnoxious. There are ads on content I paid for. I can't check out without five annoying alerts. All those Prime deals look a lot less like deals and more like ways to bump up pricing for people who don't opt in. All in all, once I cancelled Amazon, it basically imploded on me, and now I only use it if there are seriously no other options.

That also pushes me away from any vendors who standardized on Amazon for logistics. All of a sudden, I realized non-Prime members just won't buy from you if you use Amazon for logistics.

It didn't used to be like that. Pre-Prime Amazon worked fine.

chung81232• 2 years ago

Prime never had video to begin with so I doubt they would discount it for you.

liendolucas• 2 years ago

So this is the cherry on top. After paying for a subscription you also have to pay to not get ads? That's lame. People should start boycotting Amazon right now.

turtlesdown11• 2 years ago

Remember, AMZN is all about "customer delight"

al_borland3• 2 years ago

It’s become more about customer plight.

ProllyInfamous• 2 years ago

I was delighted (as a former Amazon Prime customer) with not only how easy it was to cancel my membership... but that they refunded the entire year [I only had four months left].

Good riddance.

crazygringo9• 2 years ago

Genuine legal question here: can this suit succeed as long as Amazon allows anyone to cancel their Prime membership with a refund of all remaining time?

You can subscribe to Prime monthly or yearly. Anecdotally, everywhere I've checked on forums, everyone who's contacted customer service to cancel their annual Prime membership has gotten a prorated refund (or even full refund in some cases). And I'm assuming that's probably their actual internal policy, specifically to avoid a lawsuit.

So if this is the case, is there any basis for this suit to succeed? It seems like it's wrong if Amazon changes the terms mid-subscription -- but it doesn't seem necessarily wrong for ongoing subscriptions if you can get out of it at any time.

notatoad• 2 years ago

And I'm assuming that's probably their actual internal policy, specifically to avoid a lawsuit.

it might be to avoid a lawsuit, but it's probably not to avoid this specific lawsuit. when i cancelled my prime, i didn't have to give any reason why, i never told anybody it was because i was mad about getting ads on prime video. but i still got the pro-rated refund for the 6mo remaining in the subscription.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

[dupe]

more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39350257

oraphalous• 2 years ago

I would dismiss such lawsuits and their plaintiffs as strange and persnickety if it weren't for...

Here in Australia, where the ads haven't been introduced yet, I got a notification from Amazon prompting to change to a yearly subscription because of the money I'd save. They've never prompted me thusly before.

I don't care about the extra dollars for ad free. It's just like raising the price of a service - which happens all the time. And what's more, it certainly WOULD benefit me to switch to yearly, which I never got around to doing.

But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Amazon is trying to lock people into year long contracts right before they change the terms. The deliberateness of THAT intent, the willingness to just so blatantly pinch from the pocket of the unwary - even if it's only a few bucks. That PISSES ME OFF.

Now I love capitalism - the right to own the sweat off your brow that stokes the competitive fires! It's the air we breathe. But these hyper-capitalist a-holes that would steal a cent if you just blink for a second... Goddamn. What makes these people?

That drop of sweat, that they didn't earn, joins the billions of others in a torrent of wealth being syphoned of the regular folk on a daily basis. And the world is growing parched.

So I salute the persnickety and fastidious Sir Wilbert Napoleon and everything he represent. I hope he wins.

adamjc• 2 years ago

This, Netflix account-sharing blocking, and the ever increasing amount of streaming platforms (that mean an overall reduced catalogue per platform) leads me to believe we will see a resurgence in piracy.

Yo, Ho, Ho :)

ijhuygft776• 2 years ago

"Went back" to piracy years ago... I actually pirated movies even when they were available on my Netflix subscription. I unsubscribed from Netflix when they started their descent into Netflix-only content.

skeaker• 2 years ago

We already are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39254807

int_19h3• 2 years ago

The system is so blatantly rigged, why would you respect the "intellectual property" rights of people who are fleecing you? At this point I'm just ripping everything worth watching using tools like StreamFab, and encouraging everyone to do the same. Given how cheap local NAS storage is these days, you can easily have all your favorite videos and shows in one place. For bonus points, Plex has much better UI than Amazon.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

Watching Ads on Amazon Prime Video Is a Deal Breaker for Some

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39178546

zerocrates• 2 years ago

I wonder what made Amazon go with this course of action.

Plenty of the other providers have done basically the same thing: the previous price now includes ads and you have to pay more to stay ad-free... but they've all done it by raising prices and introducing a lower with-ads tier.

To me it feels worse to have your service downgraded with the option to pay more to get it back than it does to have your price increased with the option to drop to a worse tier. That's sort of irrational, as the price increase is basically "opting you in" to pay more, but also just reflects how much ads suck.

In terms of Amazon's choice, my best guess is that it's a reaction to an effect I've seen other providers describe: the ads are so lucrative they actually earn more on the lower-tier customers.

rc-1140• 2 years ago

The most important question, in my opinion, is will this class-action suit actually result in any meaningful change or will Bezos/Amazon scrape up some cash to make this "little lawsuit problem" go away?

malermeister• 2 years ago

Get a seedbox for like 10 bucks a month, throw on Jellyfin, Radarr and Sonarr and never worry about this BS ever again.

I used to pay for Netflix and Prime. It keeps getting more fragmented, more expensive and more shittified.

Like Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. I'm willing to pay a reasonable monthly fee for a good service. Unfortunately the only ones providing that are pirates.

hasbot• 2 years ago

More info for those (like me) that didn't know what a seedbox is: https://www.reddit.com/r/seedboxes/wiki/index/what_is_a_seed...

notyourwork• 2 years ago

I’d love for a real economic discussion on what a fair price is. I agree with your point but not sure there is a price point consumers would tolerate and business could maintain a profitable business model with. That’s the fundamental issue we have right now.

rdudek• 2 years ago

What's worse is they locked Dolby Atmos and HDR behind the paid tier, something that used to be available normally. The Enshitification of Amazon continues.

spandrew• 2 years ago

I cancelled my Amazon Prime after this email. $2.99 isn't a lot, but I was already on the fence given all of their good shows were heading to the dumpster fire that is the + premium channels; Paramount+ AMC+ channels, etc.

So far I haven't missed it. I watch more YouTube than any of these services anymore.

sakopov• 2 years ago

I guess next quarter is going to be a blowout. Amazon is pulling all kinds of levers in the name of profitability. AWS is now charging for [public IPV4 usage](https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/02/aws-ipv4-charges/) which will bring $1B in revenue.

xtracto• 2 years ago

I found it amusing that just yesterday the Federal Comission for Competition (COFECE) in Mexico, gave a ruling to Amazon and one of its competitors Mercadolibre that they have to "unbundle" their video/streaming offerings from their "Prime" or "Plus" payment subscription, because they are distorting the market [1]. I just hope that they can follow up the ruling and don't succumb to Corporate pressure or corruption.

[1] https://businessinsider.mx/cofece-exige-amazon-mercado-libre...

Amazon Sued over Prime Video Ads: Class-Action Suit Alleges Deception

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