Prime video has quietly doubled the amount of advertising, it shows paying customers. According to Adweek, the initial ad loading is at two to three and a half minutes of ads per hour now in four to six minutes.
I’m not surprised: Amazon told investors last year that it would increase the amount of ads and introduce new ways to annoy you when you pause or browse. But as one of those subscribers who see these ads, I’m really not sure if I stay and pay for a service that gets worse and that I expect will continue to get worse.
The fact that I am in the UK is worth noting here. I’ve seen lots of reports saying “Hi, you know it’s not as bad as US Broadcast TV, Amirite!”. But I come from a place where TV advertising is much more civilized. Of course, American viewers have long been exposed to 13 to 16 minutes of ads per hour. But here in the UK, the regulator says the most important TV stations – including the commercial TV stations ITV, STV and UTV – can only an average of seven minutes an hour.
This means that Amazon can still keep his promise to show fewer ads than the “linear TV” networks it competes with in the US while increasing the ad load to show tremendous more advertising than British TV companies show. And these TV stations don’t charge me a monthly subscription to watch their ads.
This is not just a Scots that complain about US-style ad, though I absolutely do. It’s also about the problem of tech companies trying to make more money by making their products worse.
Here is the reason why streaming is broken
I have written about digital media, archiving and streaming for a very long time, and what made streaming success was simple: it was less of a pain than piracy. Sure you could stick around Pirate Bay or use a peer for peer app, but why do it bother when you had Netflix right there? A fixed fee, lots of good things to look at, no ads: a no-brainer.
But of course we don’t just have Netflix now. What we have instead is endless streamers with shareholders who want growth, growth and more growth in a market that is overpowered at a time when the cost of everything is soaring and people’s incomes are not.
If you can’t win new customers, you can push those you have harder. And again and again, it seems to be the option that tech companies prefer: password crashes and ads and price increases and ads and less choices and ads and reduced video quality and ads and no atmos without upgrading and ads and ads on ads on ads on the ads.
Here in the UK we have an airline that people love to hate, Ryanair; The American equivalent is probably spirit. But even though the low-cost carriers are widely hated, we still use them because there is not really an alternative-so they can throw away the seats and give the luggage allowance the size of a coke can and maybe start filling the aircraft with snakes and honey limits and mustard gas in the middle of the go and we will put it up with it because there is no other option.
But that is not the case with streaming.
There are plenty of other options for viewers, albeit not with exactly the same shows. But for the shows you can’t get, there is piracy – often in full quality and HDR with atmos and no ad breaks.
I’m not here to argue for the legality (it’s illegal in most places) or moral (it’s bad) of piracy. But as a person who has covered online media since the 1990s who lived through the file sharing wars, I can promise you that what got piracy of was not disappeared was not Metallica defendant colleges or ISPs banning the weirding child. It was Spotify and then it was Netflix.
The best streaming services beating piracy because there exceeds Breaking Bad On Netflix was less trouble and a much better experience than gathering the episodes via Pirate Bay.
Is it still true?
And if it’s for how much longer?
