Prime is adding ads to their streaming service
I think I might cancel. I'm not watching ads and I'm not going to pay the extra $3/mo to opt out. I don't know if I'd end up paying more than the subscription cost in shipping though....
Are other online retailers so hopelessly sucky that you can't live without Amazon over in the states? It just blows my mind because Amazon honestly sucks compared to the more local stores where I'm at in the Nordics.
For me it’s the fast shipping I can’t live without.
I recently moved into a new apartment and needed to run a network cord from our router to the other side of the apartment to put an access point so we’d have good WiFi coverage. I went online to several other retailers for the few things I needed (cat6, crimp tool, and a few other things), but all of them wanted me to pay ~$25 or more for their slowest shipping option of 5-7 business days.
Meanwhile, Amazon had everything at my door the next day with free shipping. I tried to avoid Bezos, but I couldn’t. :(
"Couldn't"
It's very obvious that consumers are completely unable to "vote with their wallets" for anything but convenience and low prices. Workers rights, equality, morals you name it are for the vast majority waaaaaay down the scale compared to price and convenience.
This is a case study on why regulation is very much needed, even though we really should be able to do with out.
I mean, usually when I need something immediately I just walk 5 minutes to the physical store and buy it.
I don't even remember a time where I needed to get something I needed immediately from Amazon. In fact, if I am getting anything from amazon it's probably because it wasn't possible to find it elsewhere and that's usually not something so important it needs same/next-day delivery.
I can't live without a crimp tool either, oh the humanity
I hate Amazon but there are several reasons I use them. Wide selection, free shipping, easy returns, and typically low prices. Every time I have tried avoiding Amazon for everything, I've run into annoying issues before long.
Also, sadly there are a lot of less common products that aren't super available elsewhere. And even when they are, I feel like it's a risk buying from some random website I've not dealt with before.
I wish others could/would compete with these advantages but most don't. And no I don't buy everything from Amazon but it is a safe fallback for the items I can't get at better retailers.
I feel the only thing they do well in my area is provide safer access to random bits and bobs that I buy from AliExpress. But that business is not what makes them rich, of course. It's people buying everything from them, but that that is even compelling is mind blowing to me due to how atrocious their website and shopping experience is. And I work in e-Commerce as well...
Most people want the question free returns, that's really the thing keeping amazon afloat compared to say eBay or aliexpress. Sure you can get the stuff directly from China in most cases, but you have to wait for a month for it to arrive and hope you don't need to return it.
As for local stores, they always cost more because of the cost of doing business, which is why Amazon is cheaper and faster to deliver.
All that said, as long as you can wait a few days, there is no need to pay for Prime, you can still get all the stuff shipped for free if you just wait until you have 45 bucks of stuff to buy.
Sure, but the question free returns are a big part of why no (well, very few) decent brands can be found on Amazon anymore.
Anyone with actually good products doesn't have the profit margins to be forced into accepting obviously unacceptable returns. (eg customer returns item they clearly broke, gets full refund, retailer is stuck with it). They also have good enough products that they don't have to put up with Amazon to reach the masses, they can sell anywhere else.
I’m in the UK but I’m largely housebound. Prime is life changing for disabled people like myself. I won’t cancel my subscription but I’ll probably pirate anything I want to watch on prime video in future, which isn’t much now they don’t have the tennis rights in the UK.
Some products are only available on Amazon, altough there's always an alternative on another shop.
I try to avoid Amazon because of how many bad products are on their platform. Other shops also list third-party sellers, but by avoiding those platforms and only buying on proper non-marketplace shops the products usually meet a minimum quality. At least my experience with shops that actually specialize in a specific categorie (pc hardware -> mindfactory.de, electronics -> reichelt.de, ...) is generally better.
Ebay for stuff, because you are usually dealing with a person that has some care for your order. Ebay doesnt wait 2 weeks to ship my stuff. Amazon now waits to ship so they can combine my orders. So in the past few months my ebay use is way up and my amazon use is way down. As far as content goes, piracy is still an awesome thing. I pay for physical books and music from bandcamp, the rest is acquired. I think people get lazier and dumber the closer you get to the equator. Thanks for your comment. a guy at 59.9n.
News broke on this a few months ago, and I jumped ship. Their failed music app is another reason I ditched their ecosystem. Kept crashing; music would pause mid-song; couldn't play downloaded music offline without a data connection.
Video service had such poor title coverage and nothing compelling for the price. As many others have said, the value proposition didn't work. Enshittification is in full swing. Sail the high seas.
Hey they have Monk
It’s a fairly niche sport, but Amazon had the tennis rights here in the UK. They’ve gone to sky now and the very minimum you’d need to pay is £30 p/m for much less choice in the way you watch matches. As for prime music, they have a good amount of ad-free podcasts, including everything from wondery. I only have prime for the free next day shipping and free returns by collection, but the tennis and podcasts were a really great extra.
An already overpriced subscription service wants more money 🤣
The real trick is you cancel AND shop elsewhere. We get most of our necessities locally now at normal retail and I'll occasionally put an Amazon order together when I need something specific and I'll spend enough for free shipping.
I missed shopping there at first, but so much of their inventory is junk now; I feel like I actually get better quality from traditional retail. The $140/yr for Prime feels like free shipping but it obviously isn't.
It really depends on where you live.
Between living in a smaller town and never ending supply chain/distribution issues: If I need something I can't get at the local store, it is a bare minimum two hour ordeal. I can usually justify that on a weekend but if my mouse dies and I need one now? Suddenly I need to figure out what else I can grab to get free shipping or if I need to just eat the costs and overnight it.
I have been doing the math and will likely stick with amazon prime. Admittedly, I increasingly don't bother to even watch the amazon shows I like (the boys and reacher) because I have increasingly become spoiled by a proper blu ray or UHD (... ripped to my plex).
Oh, your computer mouse. Anyway, I just paused my membership in the hopes that my spending habits improve. We'll see how "emergencies" get handled without the shipping benefits.
140$? Why is this so expensive in the us? We pay 90€ (~100$) in Germany. So brake even is with like 20x 5€ shipping orders per year. Which I sadly do pretty easily. Getting the stuff I need locally is sadly not that easy.
Don't forget their tax.
Base is 139.99 (140) + tax on top.
So even more expensive.
Same here
And I continue adding primevideo's content to my Jellyfin server
This and the rising costs plus adding ads to 'basic' tiers and attempting to create limitations (resolutions, "screens", offline downloads) is what might push me to build a nice, large NAS. We don't want Cable again.
Jellyfin + Synology NAS was a great investment for me! ;)
Wouldn’t go back.
I appreciate the advice! I am thinking of Synology or perhaps DIY with either TrueNAS (Scale likely) or Unraid. Synology would be cheap, small, easy on power and thermals too though and I've been looking at the latest and previous gen DS2XX lines.
Also I appreciate the Jellyfin mention. I've been using Plex so long and was thinking about something else like Jellyfin especially but I've never worked with it before.
We won't get cable again. Video streaming is already much worse and declining rapidly.
This is such a weird way of announcing/implementing a $3/month increase for Prime video by Amazon, and a lot more destructive PR-wise too.
Lol needlessly downgrading all the customers instead of increasing their price. Can we just make subscriptions track inflation metrics so I at least know how fucked I am on average?
Lemmy needs a DataIsBeautiful community, they’d make that graph.
Right? If it just went up a bit I wouldn't have blinked an eye. Ads on something I (technically my dear husband) already pay for just pisses me off. It feels like they're holding ad-free viewing hostage
Right? For how much companies seem to love bubblewrapping anything they do in PR, they sure do suck at it sometimes...
I wish I could just get Prime shipping and drop the video service. I may still drop the whole thing.
Nothing quite like paying an annual fee to ensure that stuff you can’t be bothered to go to the store for are handled by a multitude of people who are systematically abused by their employer.
This is essentially what's happening, but instead of them lowering the prime fee and removing videos, they're adding the additional fee to remove ads from the video service
Announced just after Christmas, a time when I assume a lot of people sign up for Prime so they can save shipping on presents.
Seems like that would backfire as people recently remember signing up.
Depends on whether or not they signed up for monthly or annual, and many get it in November so things they order show up in time before the xmas postal hell.
It seems like it would work because people wouldn't think they got their value out of their prime membership yet and are reluctant to cancel after such a short time.
What the hell do people watch on prime? I got it for Thursday night football. There’s nothing interesting on there and half the content is “rent/buy”
prime has some really good shows (invincible, the boys, and good omens are the ones i've watched) but ultimately it is WAY too expensive
The Boys, Expanse, Invincible, Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings, Fleabag, Good Omens, Man in the High Tower and Reached come to mind. Admittedly, I haven't watched a few of those.
Half? That's optimistic.
It still has a better selection than Netflix.
And Usenet has a better selection than both combined, for cheaper and a better experience.
I canceled Prime in 2021. The expedited shipping is nice and all but it really just felt like paying rent to someone I don't like nor want or have to pay rent to.
Same here
Regarding the shipping cost:
Just collect things to buy until you are over the treshold.
Helped me with overbuying stuff I don't even really need.
If you are moatly in it for the shipping: Just stop. You give them more money through that than paying for shipping.
Scamazon
Bait and switch.
I’m ditching it. The convenience has gone and content has gone. I built a wish list which is now mostly unavailable.
I need to up my game in terms of automating my torrenting and making it family - accessible.
Man I just moved to the arr's I'm a Usenet guy.. but torrents are the same deal.. I added overseerr on top of that and all I do now is "request" it on overseerr and blamonit appears on my Plex server.
For example if you wanted to download all of the seasons of say... SpongeBob. With overseerr it's literally 1. search for the show 2. click request and wait.
Super easy, barely an inconvenience Check out trash guides and overseerr.dev
I run all of mine in docker with docker compose.
Also I gave my mil and fil link to overseerr which Plex authenticates... They can request what ever and it appears.
Is there an idiot guide how to do this? I've never pirated and I don't currently have a VPN. I use my Xbox for streaming straight to my TV using HDMI. I see posts like yours with various words like Plex, overseerr, docker, jellyfin, etc., and I don't know where to even start. I could Google it, but among the hundreds of results, I don't know which things are reputable, functional, and not malware.
I have some room to optimize my torrenting setup but it'll never be as good as watching the trailer for a show and immediately with one button push, watching the show itself. I mean, fiddling on my phone and waiting 10 mins is the best it's gonna get, but that's still better than going over to my always-on, old laptop whose only job it is to torrent, finding the one I want, waiting for it to download, then moving it over to my Plex server.
Might I introduce you to https://movie-web.app/ It’s a great in between while you wait for stuff to download
Tbh i just have prime and pirat the stuff i want anyway, even if i technically have access to ot the "legal" way, because its just way easier to find what i want on the piracy site of my choice than on prime...
(i need the one day shipping pretty regularly so the money isn't wasted)
Same, I have a handful of streaming services (mostly split with other households) because it's easier to watch something right now than in 10 mins at the absolute minimum, or tomorrow, depending on the current status of high seas shipping lanes. But I'm not fucking watching ads. I'm paying for the service, fuck your ads.
I just wish they'd split off streaming from shipping.
No one needs one day shipping. And the human toll that Amazon and their prime service takes on their workers should be enough for anyone to stop using their services wholesale.
I'd already decided to cancel Prime when they cancelled The Peripheral after renewing it. Had I not, this decision would have made the choice for me.
Right? Such a good show.
They canceled that!?! Man, they really hyped it up. I planned on watching it. They cancel as soon as viewership drops. 🙄
Everything worth seeing can be torrented anyway. I canceled a year ago and haven’t noticed a loss of anything as long as any orders are over $35 for free shipping.
All of their ads that said "there's more to prime!" are what planted the seed in my mind that I should cancel. I don't use any of the "more" stuff, but we were paying for it anyway.
I don't miss Prime at all. You still get free shipping as long as you let you wait until you have $35 of stuff in your cart.
that's fine if you have the patience for their shipping shenanigans. they sit on orders for days and/or ship from distant warehouses when you don't have the prime sub.
Alternatively stop buying from a company that dehumanizes and exploit’s their employees to death
I haven't noticed much of a difference in shipping time. If I order something online I'm not depending on it to arrive quickly.
Not really defending Amazon, but that’s not really shenanigans either. If you’re expecting 100% completely free shipping without prime, they’re going to wait to send it with a more cost efficient larger shipment to your region while prioritizing prime orders. Sometimes the distant warehouses are used even with prime because that’s where those items are, they don’t keep them stocked everywhere, especially when they process third party orders. I can easily expect to wait 2 weeks or more for something if I don’t pay for shipping.
Living in a major city where we have a Amazon warehouse, I cancelled prime because they failed their promise on two day shipping. 2021-2023, I started seeing packages take as long as 5 days. Now, half my orders take that long. What is the point of that's the whole ad pitch?
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
Hearing about this got me to reevaluate whether I needed Prime and I ended up cancelling altogether. Just a heads up, if you cancel mid-subscription (I was on the yearly plan) you get the option to cancel service immediately and refund what you didn't use. I was supposed to re-up in May and ended up getting $63 refunded.
Guess I'll be putting Helluva Boss on my Plex server.
Meh.
My prime was already cancelled because they billed me in early January, when that extra $100 could be used on Christmas gifts, so it always snuck up on me.
I didn't use it enough to justify it anyway.
The people on your man o' war
\
Are treated worse than scum
\
I'm no flogging captain
\
And by God I've sailed with some
\
Come with me to Barbary
\
We'll ply there up and down
\
Not quite exactly
\
In the service of the Crown
To lay with pretty women
\
To drink Madeira wine
\
To hear the rollers thunder
\
On a shore that isn't mine
-- Mr. Knofler Privateering
I thought for sure this was an Alestorm song, at first. Now I'll be listening to pirate metal all day 😋
I will totally check out Alestorm.
Freevee is Amazon prime video junior with ads, and that's already free. WTF, is Amazon thinking or not thinking?
How do we access free view? Is there an app?
Freevee, sorry for the typo.
It is super easy to cancel. You even get a partial refund if you want it gone today. Wait a couple months and see if you really miss it. Join the piracy gang. Ultimately, you are the product and Internet streaming has turned into cable TV. Take back what little privacy you have left.
they still do free shipping on orders over like 30 quid
I have never found anything particularly worth watching on Prime. Well Good Omens but that's not enough for a whole service.
The Expanse. The Boys and Gen V. Sneaky Pete. Man in the High Castle.
Those are all pretty good. Certainly not a catalog worth having the service ... But it is a good list to have in relation to the title of this commity. Yar.
Invincible
So many okay shows under one roof. How will I ever cancel?
I liked tales frome the loop, but I don't have prime and only watched the show from a friend's account. For me it wouldn't be worth it either
$5 to my local pbs station a month and get passport = the only streaming service i need
A passport to leave the country?
I thought about torrenting both series of Good Omens out of spite when I found out about this
Canceled a few months ago.
When I cancelled Prime I found myself buying a lot, a lot less from Amazon overall.
Prime is SGD2.99/month in Singapore (~USD2.26). For that you get free next day (sometimes same day) shipping, Prime Video, Prime Gaming, access to buy Amazon Fresh groceries, and probably other stuff I’m forgetting. Singapore also has low import duty which means access to a lot of Amazon US products which also come with Prime shipping, albeit they usually take a week or two to deliver.
It’s very obviously predatory pricing and I assume one day it’ll go through the roof like it has in the US but it’s interesting that Amazon can do this, right?
deleted
It’s unusual pricing as Singapore (rather notoriously) has a high cost of living and a lot of wealthy people kicking about. Usually digital service costs are comparable to US/European prices. There are a few other online shopping options (eg Lazada and Shoppee) that could be regarded as incumbents with likely higher market share, hence my suspicion on the predatory pricing, just as you say really.
Curious, where in Singapore do you live? Last time I tried Prime, it usually took a few days for them to ship my stuff, even with Prime listings that were fufilled by Amazon SG. To be fair, it was a year or so ago, so maybe things have changed, but I thought that next-day shipping was only a US thing 🤷♂️
I’ve lived on both the East and West sides and have always had next-day shipping regardless, at least since 2021 anyway. There have been a few items that have taken 2-3 days - particularly recently with the holidays - but that’s been the exception, not the rule. I’ve even seen same-day shipping for a few items recently but I think that’s charged.
I had mine cancelled and reupped cause I literally buy things I need randomly and sometimes never hit the free shipping. Most of my stuff is farm related fixing things, so I definitely hit the price I pay...still really annoyed that it's $140 a year now, but I get my money out of it....
Fuck you bundle Amazon day ship option...
Yea that's why I still have it too. Shipping costs make up for the price because of the stuff I buy. Everything else is a bonus.
With this Amazon is taking a page from Nintendo's play book.
What made decide to cancel Prime was realizing that Amazon was adding a markup to prime products that effectively cancelled out any shipping savings. But also prime video offering was crap where I live.
That and Amazon being a terrible company that I didn't want to support anyway.
prevent paying more for shipping by not using amazon at all.
What does this mean for shows and movies that I purchased? Will they have ads unless I pony up? If I cancel Prime will I lose access to them?
Nothing. No. No.
Is it possible to have Prime, but without Prime Video? I don’t give one iota of a fuck about their shit ass streaming service.
No
I don’t even pay for prime for streaming. Watched a movie or two on there when it was something I wanted to see and found out it was free on Prime. Otherwise, I use it for the expedited shipping. I did briefly cancel in 2021, but the spouse complained. We split it now anyway, so it’s cheaper. Overall, though the quality of products offered on Amazon has gone way down hill. If the product is something that doesn’t need to be quality, it’s fine, but if you’d have to replace the item if it is not quality, you’re better off skipping Amazon. The value proposition is declining.
They'll keep an ad-free option for another $2.99/month per https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/entertainment/prime-video-update-announces-limited-ads
They'll keep an ad-free option
THAT WAS THE FUCKIN OPTION WE WERE PAYING FOR
Fuck Jeff Bawbag
unsubscribe from everything except the great courses. thank me later.
I was rooting for Prime Video but they don't even have any Premiership football from next season, so it's an irrelevant service now
I paid for 15 days of Real Debrid and other than running into a lot of non-English streams it's been great. If I can get it convenient to download shows automatically (I've heard of ways to integrate with arr services) I might start cancelling services.
https://github.com/rogerfar/rdt-client
This masquerades as qbittorentt allows you to use RD with *arr
Are you not using it in tandem with stremio?
Was using CinemaHD so far. Stremio looks nice but I'd prefer Jellyfin become the new go-to app for media so we're not still flipping back and forth between apps.
This is one of many reasons why I'm selling my Kindle Paperwhite and getting a Pocketbook Ink Pad 3 Color. Amazon is the Apple of retail, which drips down to even the ebooks. I do, however, have to consider my wife's comfort when ordering stuff, but otherwise, ready to pull the plug on Bezoz and his gang.
I have it for the shipping otherwise I'd cancel. I'm certainly not watching the stuff on there with ads.
Looks like Amazon wants to close off this year with yet another rent-seeking episode. Thankfully I don't use Amazon, but my parents still pay for Prime specifically for their streaming service, so this is going to be very annoying for them :/
It was already bad enough when they advertised for their own shows at the beginning of episodes...
Anyway, I stopped subscribing to Prime years ago, didn't want to give my money to Amazon unless I have no other place to purchase some items.
This year, I bought a Costco membership and ditched Prime. Fuck Amazon.
I’ve literally never streamed a single video from prime and don’t plan to. The deals for prime members and shipping alone save me more than the yearly cost. The instant their yearly cost outweighs shipping fees I’ll cancel in a second.
Isn't shipping still free though?
I can wait a few days for most of my stuff. For what I need right away, there are brick and mortar stores nearby
No, it’s not free on most things. And it still takes a few days with prime