Amazon Enshittifies Prime Streaming With Higher Costs To Avoid Ads

from the enshittification-as-a-service dept

Back in early 2024, Amazon announced that Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) would be charged $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn’t previously exist. It was just the latest example of “enshittification” in a streaming sector all out of original ideas, desperate to provide Wall Street with impossible skyward quarterly growth — regardless of consumer annoyance or brand harm.

And it just got worse.

Just recently, Amazon informed subscribers that the $3 extra fee to avoid ads would now be $5 a month. Again, on top of the $140 people are already paying. Worse, Amazon appears to be eliminating 4K support for its ad-based offerings to funnel users toward paying more if they want to enjoy the now fairly basic standard:

“On April 10, 2026, Prime Video’s ad-free subscription will become Prime Video Ultra in the U.S., priced at $4.99 per month. The new Ultra subscription includes other perks: Subscribers will have up to five concurrent streams (previously three), up to 100 downloads for offline viewing (previously 25) and exclusive access to 4K/UHD streaming.”

Variety parrots the claim these are “perks,” but they’re really just arbitrary old and new restrictions being shuffled around to drive users to more expensive options if they want much of the same experience they had before when they were paying less money.

This sort of “funneling” was pioneered by the traditional cable, broadband, and wireless sector, which creatively found new ways to abuse market power to extract more and more money from captured subscribers. There was a whole multi-year tech policy war about it (net neutrality) which U.S. consumers decidedly lost. Streaming’s a bit different because users still have options and agency. For now.

As new growth in streaming customers has slowed down, giant media companies have returned to these ancient ways to give Wall Street their sweet, sweet, improved quarterly returns and illusions of bottomless growth. That means not just price hikes, but layoffs, pointless mergers, less money spent on content and residuals (meaning they’re too cheap to keep popular programs online), and crackdowns on things that used to be consumer benefits, like password sharing.

The short term stock boosts and tax gains from this kind of gamesmanship and consolidation disincentivizes execs from learning anything useful from the experience. By the time consumers begin a backlash and the longer-term health of the service begins to tank, the executives who led the charge are already off working at a different company on the basis of their “savvy deal-making prowess.”

When consumers inevitably flee to cheaper or free alternatives (YouTube, Twitch, piracy, whatever), the execs that remain then blame literally everything and everyone (generational entitlement!, VPNs!, avocado toast!) for their own greed and bad decisions. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Filed Under: advertisements, enshittification, fees, prime video, streaming

Companies: amazon