SEATTLE—Following a streaming industry-wide trend towards inundating viewers with more advertising on streaming media, Amazon’s Prime Video has announced plans to add advertising in 2024 to its previously ad-free offering of movies and TV shows.
Prime subscribers, who already pay $14.99 a month or $139 a year for an annual subscription, will have the option of paying an additional $2.99 a month to avoid the ads.
Traditionally Prime Video has not shown ads on its main movies and TV offering but has included ads on Thursday Night Football and Amazon’s free-ad-supported streaming service Freevee.
Prime Video had a 3.4% share of total TV viewing in August and the addition of ads to its vast library of content could produce significant revenue.
Amazon spent about $16.6 billion on content in 2022.
The company said the ad load would be less than that of linear TV, where ad loads excluding promos, typically run 13 to 15 minutes on broadcast TV and cable.
In a blog post, the company noted that they have invested heavily in is Prime Video, which “offers a vast selection of movies and series, including Amazon Originals, and live sports….To continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time, starting in early 2024, Prime Video shows and movies will include limited advertisements. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. Ads in Prime Video content will be introduced in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Canada in early 2024, followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia later in the year. No action is required for Prime members. We’re not making changes in 2024 to the current price of Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* for U.S. Prime members and will share pricing for other countries at a later date. We will email Prime members several weeks before ads are introduced into Prime Video with information on how to sign up for the ad-free option if they would like.”
