Amazon Prime Video subscribers: You're getting ads from today (unless you pay to avoid them)

Amazon Prime Video, the streaming subscription service, is getting adverts as of today.

2

Amazon first announced that this was happening back in September 2023, but the actual day the new rules for Prime Video subscribers kick in is today, January 29.

If you don't want your viewing to be interrupted with advertising, then you'll have to sign up to pay a little bit more for an ad-free streaming experience.

The cost is an additional $2.99 per month, which means that you'll be forking out $11.98 instead of $8.99 every month for Prime Video. (Or $17.98 instead of $14.99 for a full Prime membership, which does, of course, come with other benefits as well as the video streaming service, including free delivery on purchases from Amazon).

You won't be upgraded to this automatically, so the default position is that you'll continue with the same payment, but you'll get ads, unless you specifically opt to make the extra payment.

Amazon has previously said the extra revenue (from the ads, or money to prevent them being shown) is needed to "continue investing in compelling content."

The firm also said that it will aim to have "meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers," so we can hope that the amount of time the advertising is shown for is kept to a minimum.

Whether that hope will be realized, well, we'll just have to see when we tune in tonight (we're currently in the middle of watching Deadloch - which is very amusing, as long as your tolerance for, shall we say, colorful language, is suitably high).

With any luck, Prime will be like Freevee (it's also owned by Amazon) which has just fleeting ads (they're really very brief indeed).