I guess Amazon is having some financial trouble because they suddenly expect people to pay an extra $3 a month if they have Prime and want to enjoy movies or television shows without advertisements. Oh, what's that? Amazon's CEO is insanely rich and the company is among the most profitable and powerful around? Imagine that.
Seriously though, Amazon Prime did something other streamers do, but in a way none have attempted. They have advertisements, but not as a new subscription level you can pick to pay less (like with Netflix et. al); instead, Amazon just kind of put advertisements on Prime and let folks know they could pay more money if they didn't like them. There was some warning this was coming but everyone is still hot pissed. I get why. You can't give people something and then suddenly take it away and demand more money for it to come back. You need to offer more features for more money or let people know they can pay a bit less to lose some benefits. Don't let me into a buffet where everything is covered after I pay the initial charge and then some years later tell me drinks suddenly cost $3 extra. You can't expect me to just drink water when I've been downing unlimited Dr. Pepper!
As Heather Kelly of the Washington Post puts it right in her headline, "The Dream of cheap, ad-free streaming TV is dead." Now we have a bunch of streamers with ads and even if you, "Cut the cord," with cable you end up paying the price of a cable subscription just to access a bunch of various apps/services that now have the very advertisements people quit cable to avoid. Streaming is a mess, and the era of prestige television seems to be fading away with, "Peak TV," now basically Unpeaked as some have put it. We were spoiled back when it was Cable and/or Netflix and that was about it outside of some premium Cable channels or Pay-per-view sporting events. Those days are long in the past, I suppose.
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