“But last month, Amazon changed the deal. To stream movies and TV shows without ads, Amazon customers must now pay an additional $2.99 per month… This is not fair, because these subscribers already paid for the ad-free version; these subscribers should not have to pay an additional $2.99/month for something that they already paid for.”
Seems like a pretty solid case where they altered the deal in the midst of a one year Prime contract. I look forward to the eventual $.32 settlement I receive.
Somewhere in the prime TOS we have agreed to this and likely much worse. I paused my subscription, not that that will mean anything to them. This lawsuit was inevitable and will change absolutely nothing no matter the outcome. The meaningful change we need is actual consumer advocacy and invalidating predatory TOS clauses. It isn't possible to live in the modern world without accepting the ridiculous and predatory TOS attached to everything and that isn't right.
Anecdata, but I and several of my friends have too. It’s a trivial amount of money ($3) but it just really rubbed me up the wrong way and that’s what led to me cancelling.
It's already been established (at least in some jurisdictions...? unclear on the details, I'm afraid) that terms in agreements like a TOS that are too far beyond the pale can, at least, be ruled unconscionable.
I cannot believe they didn't roll this out as some feature flag based on account signup/renew date, and instead just told all paid members they're now being downgraded(remember, it's not just ads, it's lower quality).
No matter what people think about the products Google has built, they absolutely did handled the subscription, grandfathering and later deprecation of Google Play Music to Youtube Music, and Youtube -> Youtube Red -> Youtube Premium. A subscriber may have lost features, but they definitely did not get upcharged as part of a transition, and only later did Google start raising rates -- separate from forced functional subscription changes.
It's not just Google either, every single pay subscription service I've ever had only altered the price for me on my renewal date (and I've often had year-long or higher subscriptions). Amazon seems to be an outlier.
Except that, from all reports online (including someone in these comments), Amazon will cancel your annual Prime subscription and refund all remaining time without any problem. They don't seem to be holding anyone to the contract. (And of course plenty of people subscribe monthly rather than annually as well.)
So I'm not sure there's any case here at all? Since even with annual subscriptions, it seems you can cancel at any time and get a prorated refund.
The fact is, online subscription services change their benefits/features all the time. And companies seem to handle it two ways: grandfather existing customers for the rest of their subscription period, or offer prorated refunds for people who want to cancel. And while the former is definitely going to make customers happier, I think they're both acceptable from a legal standpoint? So I'm not sure this lawsuit has any chance of succeeding at all.
How does that work? They obviously can add and remove content so that wasn't in the commitment. Was ad free streaming on all their content in the commitment?
But if you tried to pay $7 they'd just say no, and cancel your service.
So in your example, there is no difference. It would work the same both ways.
(Gym memberships sometimes won't cancel in the middle, nor will cell phone contracts that subsidize your initial phone -- but in my experience most monthly subscriptions and utilities will just cancel you.)
Simply canceling mid contract isn’t a perfect remedy. Consider, should they get to keep the interest on the money they are handing back to you? Obviously not.
Contracts are enforceable because society is much worse off if they aren’t. Imagine if your bank could arbitrarily cancel a car loan and ask for the outstanding balance back at any time simple because they felt like it.
It's only being multiplied by the number of people who are canceling because of this.
If that's 0.1% of 200 million subscribers who cancel, that's about $400K in supposed interest. Not half a billion. A rounding error for Amazon.
But interest just doesn't generally factor into small consumer "returns". If you buy shoes online and then return them 25 days later because they don't match the photos exactly, you don't get interest on that either. At these amounts, it's not worth worrying about.
Amazon canceled the existing deal for 100% of their customers and thus accepted money without delivering the advertised service. What happens in the future is a different question, especially when they aren’t willing to give a full refund.
Also when you return something you got the utility of the item and deprive the seller of the item for that time period. Larger up front payment for services not rendered is simply a net loss.
> The number who accept the new deal or don’t even notice the difference is irrelevant to this calculation.
Of course it's relevant. If someone doesn't cancel, there's nothing being refunded, so there's no theoretical interest to be paid back. They accept that, going forwards, the deal is still worth it for them.
The refund-with-interest you brought up isn't about compensation for no longer having video without ads, it's about the remainder of your payment having been tied up during your previous usage. If you continue the subscription, that means you want to continue to keep the upfront payment in exchange for the lower annual rate. There's no interest on anything to be paid back. It wouldn't make any conceptual sense.
> They accept that, going forwards, the deal is still worth it for them.
People doing nothing isn’t consent. ~0.1% of their customers die each month, you can’t argue the dead are accepting a new deal.
Further, if you’re unwilling to preform a full refund, they are asking if the service is worth $69.50 not the $71.59 or whatever they actually owe you. A slightly worse service for slightly less money isn’t a true test here.
> If you continue the subscription, that means you want to continue to keep the upfront payment in exchange for the lower annual rate.
Order and pay for a burger and fries from McDonalds and accepting a burger from them isn’t saying they don’t still owe you the fries.
There is no continuing a contract that’s already been broken. You can accept a new contract going forward but that’s a different question.
I literally don't know what you are talking about anymore.
You were originally talking about getting a small amount of interest refunded on top of them already refunding your unused portion. And I simply pointed out that it's a negligible amount of money that doesn't really matter. Amazon is not stealing half a billion dollars from people like you claimed.
Now you seem to be talking about refunds or something, but I can't tell what. Obviously you don't get a refund for your past months of annual, because you used them already on free shipping and video-watching. And Amazon already will refund your future months if you don't like the change. That's fair. It's like when you try to order something online and then two days later they tell you it's out of stock and they aren't carrying it anymore in the future either and they refund you. A refund is acceptable compensation.
I’m talking about the same thing as my first comment: ‘ Simply canceling mid contract isn’t a perfect remedy.’ Musk didn’t get to simply walk away from Twitter and lost a ton of money because he couldn’t renegotiate at that point.
Contracts are binding, that’s the entire point. The interest bit is just one small part of that, but it’s illustrative of what gets done to compensate people for breaching a contract.
Getting out legally is no big deal. Provide services until the end of the contract and then cancel the automatic renewal until the new terms are agreed upon is the least contentious option. But obviously no company wants to do this as many dead accounts are still automatically renewing. Thus lawsuits just like this one which companies often though not always lose.
Maybe it's not a 100.00% perfect remedy, but it's generally considered good enough for small consumer things. For small consumer things, a prorated refund is seen as sufficiently acceptable.
There's a big difference between a custom contract concerning billions of dollars involving teams of lawyers, and a annual consumer subscription a little over a hundred dollars.
Quite simply, you can't show any substantial damages here. Nobody got harmed because a subscription option ceased to be available (the way shareholders would have been harmed if Twitter hadn't sold).
Contract law doesn't treat all contracts equally importantly. Contracts aren't some ironclad unbreakable perfect guarantee. To go back to your example -- if you pay for a burger and fries, and then they discover they're out of fries, they don't have an obligation to deliver fries to your house tomorrow. They can just refund you.
In this particular case, it's just not a big deal. Contracts get broken all the time, and the correct legal remedy is very often simply to ensure payment for services previously rendered and a refund for any other payment. Especially if there's no provision in the contract for fines or penalties. Remember, the Twitter deal had penalties built in to the contract. Amazon's obviously doesn't.
> you can't show any substantial damages here. Nobody got harmed because a subscription option ceased to be available
A few dollars for one person can add up quickly in aggregate.
Again, they could have easily rolled this out as existing subscriptions expired. Further the existence of that option sets them up for meaningful penalties not simply reimbursement.
> Contracts get broken all the time, and the correct legal remedy is very often simply to ensure payment for services previously rendered and a refund for any other payment.
No. That’s often what one side offers as a low ball, but it is the legal system is who ultimately gets to decide on remedies when each side disagrees and it’s relatively rare for them to accept a partial refund of the remaining term.
Amazon could have offered a nominal refund say 1$ or say an extra week extension for free. Anyone accepting that wouldn’t have been able to sue. But the existence of a partial refund policy on its own isn’t a remedy.
You already acknowledged that their offer wasn’t enough to make people 100% whole. That’s by definition damages.
> And with these kinds of small consumer transactions, nobody cares about interest.
Amazon defiantly cares about the ~half billion per year in interest they collect collectively on these subscriptions. It’s backed into the annual discount they are willing to give.
Balancing that benefit is the entire point of class action lawsuits. Where one person isn’t going to chase after 2$, a law firm is happy to chase after a slice of x00 million in damages. On the surface X people get some trivial payout, but society is vastly better off when companies can’t illegally nickel and dime people without any consequences.
Can you finance monthly payments on a new Fire TV from Amazon and then midway through just quit paying: but to keep it from being a tort in the same way, let them have you send it back if they want it. And they have to go through your confusing UI or wait on hold for 40 minutes to request you send it back, but you don't pay any more either way.
Not with Amazon, but that was historically a business model for things like TV's, called rent-to-own. If you couldn't keep paying, you had to bring it back to the store. After enough payments, it was yours.
Users are also harmed by watching the ads. It would be reasonable to calculate the value of each viewed ad as part of the compensation that is sought by a class-action.
It's hard to show legally that users are harmed by watching ads, tort law requires a clear path to harm. If some users purport some benefit, that would negate the harm claims.
If you, and 1000 others, paid $X each for a car with 18" rims, and each of you received a car with 22" rims, then you have all been harmed; regardless of whether or not any recipient is more or less happy with the result. The harm is not the result, it's the fraud that lead to it.
Furthermore, Amazon has already written this argument with its actions: They didn't only introduce ads, they also introduced a higher-priced ad-free tier. By the Amazon's very action - which happens to be the context for this entire argument - the ability to watch without ads has a dollar value. That means the inability to watch without ads must have the inverse value, i.e. equivalent harm.
If less nice car doesn't have some of the same safety features like side impact air bags but are then in a t-bone collision where you are injured because the air bags were not there, then yes.
OK, but we are discussing something you'd pay money not to experience. I can only think that this implies that experience is in someway harmful, painful, or unpleasant.
> Even if the lawsuit is successful, I suspect it will cost Amazon much less than what they are projecting to make.
What's the point then? It appears only lawyers stand to gain from this, as usual.
As soon as fines and legal infractions are viewed merely as the 'cost of doing business', enforcing regulations becomes futile. At that point, might as well transition to a 'free for all' market rather than maintain a faux judicial system.
The point is that fines and legal infractions are the cost of doing business. The government consistently fails to enforce laws in a meaningful way. We are indeed in the midst of a free for all, where "all" here refers to established interests wholly capable of buying legislation and courts.
The point is it heavily discourages this kind of mid subscription bait and switch.
Not living in a world where bait and switch / illegal business practices are 10x as common is the benefit of class action lawsuits not the occasional random check for $1.37 or worse a coupon etc. Long term they could have rolled out adds as people resubscribe and there’s no lawsuit, and next time they may consider doing so.
This is exactly what I was going to say. Prime is sold as an annual purchase, and they didn’t structure the deal so that it would kick the ads in when your current term expires.
> I look forward to the eventual $.32 settlement I receive.
Do you know why amount is always ridiculously low. Are these lawsuits primarly for the lawyers to make a buck, I dont see how anyone else would be motivated otherwise.
They have a low chance of success in court, and are a relatively expensive proposition for the plaintiff lawyers pursuing them. As such, the lawyers are happy to take a generous (to them) settlement before the case gets too far. On the opposite side, it helps the company avoid expensive discoveries, low-probability but possibly very expensive judgements, and gets rid of the need to keep investors informed about nuisance suits.
You, Big Business Co, do something that injures a bunch of people for a small amount. A lawyer files a lawsuit on behalf of a purported class - i.e. "Everyone Bezos Hurt vs. Amazon". There's a whole thing about class certification and other things I don't have time to get into, but let's say the judge agrees that this is a class whose harms can be adjudicated together.
At some point, if you actually have a claim, Amazon wants to pay money for it to go away. This is an accepted part of the legal system, because US courts are adversarial courts[0]. The judge is just the referee. That means that if the plaintiff and defendant agree to take their business elsewhere, the judge can't get involved and continue to prosecute a dead case[1].
First problem: lawyers don't work for free. In fact, pretty much all of them are in massive amounts of student debt until their 40s and 50s, because their ability to command insane amounts of money for their services is priced into the cost of their education. Normally, a lawyer either gets paid by their client, or the client agrees to the lawyer taking a percentage cut of the damage award if one were to exist. Problem is, there's no client yet - we're suing on behalf of an abstract group of people that may or may not want to be involved in the case.
Second problem: we don't know who's a member of the class, or even how many people are a member of it. Settlement agreements typically involve cash payments of a fixed amount. You have to divvy that fixed amount up to an unknown number of people.
So as a result every class action settlement works like this: first, the lawyer gets a cut of the settlement, then the class splits it up however many ways. People have to respond to a settlement offer in order to be included in the class. If more people sign up than we have money for, however, then the class members are diluted. Amazon's liability does not increase just because they harmed more people than they thought.
This is, effectively, a weird kind of double protection racket, in which the person shaking Amazon down for money is also taking money from Amazon to shake them down for less so the mob (us) doesn't get as much. All of it is enabled by fairly understandable and straightforward rules being chained together to arrive at a terrible result.
[0] The opposite of this is inquisitorial courts. Inquisitorial as in NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!
[1] There are certain situations in which a judge can object to a settlement that is unfair to the class, but they can't outright demand the case be brought to trial.
Assuming a settlment is reached, it would probably require Amazon to stop their practice of charging additional fees in exchange for not harassing customers with ads. That latest internet meme from Cory Doctorow labels this particular form of bait-and-switch as "enshittification".
Perhaps the plaintiffs get only a dainty payout as a result of a settlement, but their lawyers will make some decent coin, and that provides the motivation to work to prove Amazon is breaking the law.
How much ad revenue does Amazon make per Prime customer on average. Is it more or less than $2.99/month. We might find out the answer to questions like these during discovery. IIRC, in past litigation we learned that Google makes about $5.50/month per user from ads.
What is the alternative. Plaintiffs could finance their own lawsuits against Amazon. Perhaps they could recover more than $.32. But how much would they have to spend on legal fees and costs to reach a settlement. Chances are, Mr. Napoleon and the other plaintiffs are not paying anything.
People who do not appreciate being harassed by ads by Amazon can engage lawyers to work for them "for free" to stop Amazon from further harassment. Plus, those people might get a check for $.32.
What's the alternative. Keep getting harassed by Amazon and complain on HN expecting something will change. That sounds even less effective and more ridiculous than class action lawsuits and $.32 settlement checks.
Here's where I'd normally complain about how our economic system requires prices to increase while product quality degrades to ensure ever-increasing profits for shareholders.
Instead, I'll complain about commercials: why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-free? Do we actually value our time less than advertisers do?
Because it’s more profitable to have something that is paid for AND has ads.
Same thing happened with cable TV when it first came out, it was advertised as ad free. Then it filled up with ads, and the streaming services came along promising no ads. Now the circle is repeating itself.
> ...critics say that the use of sponsorship could make cable programmers more vulnerable to censorship or control by advertisers, particularly in light of recent efforts by organizations such as the Moral Majority and its offshoot, the Coalition for Better Television.
40+ years later I think it's pretty clear this was an accurate prediction.
> A much-cited - and widely disputed - study by the Benton & Bowles advertising agency found that the public would accept advertising if it meant a reduction or a holding-of-the-line on subscription fees...
This is great until a year later when YoY revenue growth is flat and prices are increased anyway.
The article doesn't once say cable TV never had ads; it only says the public had some perception that would be the case. In fact, it even talks about how cable channels were bringing in millions of dollars in ad revenues despite being very small markets at the time.
In reality, cable TV had ads from day one, decades before this article was published. Originally every cable TV station had ads, because they were just retransmissions of broadcast stations which ran ads. The first nation-wide cable TV station had ads, and many of the early cable-only channels (CNN, USA, others) had ads.
The problem is that the most lucrative advertising market is to advertise to those people who are willing to pay extra to not see ads. The people who are willing to save money by seeing ads, are also the people who don't have excess discretionary cash that they'd be willing to spend on the products advertisers are advertising to them. This is the paradox that keeps driving this industry around in circles, swallowing its own tail.
There was an interesting interview with a long timer with google on a podcast I listen to (freakanomics?) where the concept of ads came up. Apparently very early on google did the analysis and found that google search provided something like $50 (can't remember the exact number) of actualizable annual value to a typical user. Which is to say they could charge around $5 monthly and it'd still be worth it for most people to pay. But the ads. They could make way more than $50 per user just during the christmas season alone. And so it was a no brainer for them to go with ads (despite anti ad sentiment being a key part of the papers that led to the creation of google...).
So, to answer your question. I think we do value our time less than advertisers do. Worse, is I suspect your eyeballs becomes more valuable to advertisers the more your willing to pay to not see ads...
I'm sure this has been going on for a while but I'm noticing an even bigger obsession with companies manifesting ad inventory locations everywhere possible. Biggest standout recently is Lyft placing large ads in their app while I'm waiting on a ride that I'm paying them for! I too used to think something that was paid for directly with actual money meant no ads but not anymore.
I think this was just a short reprieve from ads in some spaces as we were adopting new tech, not a norm that is just recently being broken. Cable TV, newspapers, magazines, and even many taxis and municipal buses have had advertisements for decades.
One of my favorite examples is LCD screens on gas pumps - yelling at you about various deals in the store, as you're standing there _giving them money for the fuel you're pumping_. Some at least have a mute button...
I will go to a gas station with those loud screens exactly once. After that, I have written them off. There is a station in my in-law's town with those. I had to fill up there once about 10 years ago as my fuel light was on. I'm 95% sure they got rid of the screens a while back but I will never go to that station again if I have a choice.
I've accidentally hit those sorts of gas stations a couple of times. I didn't even bother getting gas at them, though. I got back in my car and drove away. I'm not willing to pay a company to abuse me. There are other stations that actually value their customers, and I'll go to them.
This same attitude is also why I stopped doing any business with Amazon years ago. They became intolerable.
If I go to those I'll lean with my hand over the speaker if they don't have a mute button. I'm not listening to whatever garbage they put together there. I wish I could do more but I need gas... I hate this world sometimes.
Monopoly is the best position to implement anti-competitive behavior. Copyright is monopoly. It should be no surprise that Copyright has resulted in anti-competitive behavior.
No one can afford to compete with large media corporations, because Copyright explicitly turns media corporations into monopolies.
Copyright is literally a monopoly over the redistribution of a "work". That's what the word means. Without the concept of monopoly, Copyright is meaningless.
If your assertion is that the concept of monopoly somehow keeps itself exclusive to that specific context, then I sincerely disagree. The system is what the system is made of.
> If your assertion is that the concept of monopoly somehow keeps itself exclusive to that specific context, then I sincerely disagree
That's fine, but you're using a strange definition. Monopoly is something that's bad. I own my house, which could be called a monopoly. I am my kids' dad - another monopoly, in the world of strange definitions. It's not useful to use words with specific meanings, particularly negative meanings, and repurpose them for everyday, non-negative situations. It's the opposite of useful. And that's why I hope you retain your monopoly on this silly definition.
On the contrary! I'm choosing my words carefully, based on their meaning.
Property and monopoly are similar, but not the same. Monopoly applies to a set of items, not a single item or group of items.
For example, you can "own" a copy of Pulp Fiction. You can watch it, you can break it, and you can sell it. What you are not allowed to do is sell a copy of the one you own. You are not allowed to do so, because Miramax LLC was granted a monopoly over the set of all Pulp Fiction copies.
You can own your house, but that is not the same as monopolizing the entire market of houses.
You don't copyright a book, you copyright what's written in it. Copyright for a novel doesn't decide who owns each printed book, it creates a monopoly over the entire market of books containing that novel. If you own the copyright to a novel, no one but you is allowed to compete in the market of books containing your novel.
Sure, they can compete in the larger overall market of all books in general, but they must avoid the segment of that market that you own a copyright to.
Absolutely, advertisers are big companies who don't really care how much they're spending on ads. Especially big brands, they have no idea how much advertising helps them, and they don't care about the budget that much. They'll absolutely pay more to put an ad in front of you than you think it's worth to remove it. That's the whole thing with ads.
> why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-free?
We can. You just have to make it first.
This is not a question to ask of others, it a just question you ask yourself. Once you answer it for yourself, then just realize that same answer applies to everyone from their perspective.
But how? I don't have the resources to build something like this on my own. I'm skeptical I could convince many investors to give me money to build something pitched as "just like Prime Video but without the ad revenue" when Amazon has certainly already done market research and determined this is the best path to maximize profit.
> Instead, I'll complain about commercials: why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-free? Do we actually value our time less than advertisers do?
Yes, clearly, as revealed by the way most consumers act.
How many people do you know that actually pay for YouTube to get rid of ads? I personally do, and I encourage everyone else to do so, but I assume it's a tiny market.
It is paid and ad free. You just have to pay the new rate.
Perhaps they should have raised the rate of base Prime, and then offered a lower priced paid w/ads option. But there was probably an issue with the annual holders in that case.
So, instead they lowered the features and now folks can up to the new subscription.
Advertisers are sort of benevolent here, if not lesser victims.
Google, Facebook and now Amazon realized the big money is in brokering ads. As brokers, they know everything and control everything, exploiting both the viewers and advertisers.
More specifically, the total revenue of ads + the people willing to pay $3/month is greater than the revenue lost when people cancel their service due to ads
> More specifically, the total revenue of ads + the people willing to pay $3/month is greater than the revenue lost when people cancel their service due to ads
The bundling makes cancellation particularly unlikely: you can't (or at least I don't know how to) cancel the Prime Video part of the Prime package alone, so there's no way to show your dissatisfaction with this short of cancelling the entire Prime membership. Which this latest push, however small on its own, has been enough to get me finally to consider doing, but it's still tough.
I consider myself lucky to have discovered how little value Prime has for shipping a few years ago when Target had a free Shipt promotion. I learned a couple things pretty quickly after I dropped Prime:
1. In most cases my Amazon orders took about the same amount of time to get to my house as they did with Prime: 3-4 days
2. Amazon has some terrible dark patterns. For example, on the product page you always see the lowest priced shipping option (usually free), but at checkout it defaults to paid shipping. It's really easy to accidentally pay an extra $5.99 for shipping, often with the same estimated arrival it would've had with free shipping.
Personally I find the shipping benefits of Prime vastly overrated. I just got a free trial of Prime, and they promised 2 day shipping... but it took 4 days. Why would someone pay for that? I tend to let items accumulate to hit the free shipping minimum and then order. Still tends to come in 2-4 days regardless.
I canceled Prime over this ad thing, and what I noticed was they seem to ship packages as the same speed, but they let the order sit for a few days before fulfilling it. It makes it seem like they find the efficiencies from treating every package the same during packing and shipping worthwhile, so they just hold the order in a queue for a few days before releasing it as a punishment for not being a Prime user.
I could be reading that wrong, but it was sure how it looked with my first few non-Prime orders.
I have a warehouse serving our entire metro area five miles from my house. Shipping takes two days after Amazon sits on my order for 2-3 days.
Their drivers are also the worst. The driver that covers my area tends to throw packages a good 10 feet at my door. Needless to say, Amazon is pretty much my last choice option these days.
I'll just watch even fewer things on Prime, I guess. Everything about the UI and watching experience seems worse than Netflix, but then ... that's been worsening recently as well in ways I can't quantify.
Same here. I had an additional cable channel subscription through Prime, which I've now cancelled, as I don't wish to tolerate any advertising in my video stream, so I will simply stop watching any video on Prime. And as you pointed out, the quality of Prime video offerings has been in decline of late.
Why won't I leave Prime (yet)? Because I have an "Amazon" visa credit card, with an admittedly serious 5% permanent discount on all purchases from Amazon (as well as companies they own, such as Whole Foods.) I won't stop purchasing products through Prime just yet; am simply careful to avoid anything that looks problematic, price-gouged, or needing aftersale support, and the discount lock-in is too attractive to me to ignore for now. But video? I can always find it elsewhere.
Same goes for "FreeVee" because "Free with ads" isn't free.
FYI, if you cancel Prime but want to keep that card, they will downgrade you to a blue Amazon branded card that still gets 3% back at Amazon. I don't know if you still get any discount at Whole Foods since I might only go there about once a year at most.
So if Prime is failing you in other ways, don't feel like you need to keep it to keep your discount.
I'm in the same position. I originally subscribed to Prime for the shipping benefits. We also started using the Prime Photos platform for our photo storage and sharing. Then I got an "Amazon" CC and I really enjoy/use the 5% cash-back program. I even have a FireTV Cube and outfitted several people with FireTV devices.
However, I'm seriously reconsidering my choices. Almost my entire family is in the Apple ecosystem and we recently purchased an Apple TV device to replace a FireTV, and I must say that it is a much better experience. And iCloud is a better photo/video sharing platform for us than Prime Photos ever was. Really, the only thing keeping me subscribed to Prime is the cash-back program.
As for Prime Video, it has always been the most crappy of the video streaming options. It's always frustrating when the things that I want to watch are not included with Prime and require a purchase or rental. And now that there are ads and lower quality, the chance that I'll watch anything on that platform is steadily declining.
I canceled my Prime a while back when AMZN's started quoting 5 day delivery to my location, though on the rare times when I do order something from AMZN it often takes 7 days.
The thing is I live less than 3 hours from a big warehouse (people who live in the same ZIP code as one of those warehouses often get 5-day shipping) but it seems that the residents of Upstate New York and New England are frequently treated as unpeople when it comes to facilities and infrastructure.
Their market research clearly saw me as some kind of anomaly if that’s the case.
If they had simply raised the price of Prime, I would have been mildly annoyed for 30 minutes and moved on with my life, as I had done many times before. Instead, on top of my yearly Prime membership, I was going to get charge a monthly fee… this just hit all the wrong notes for me. It felt so cheap. Here I am paying for a premium service and they are going to nickel and dime me with a monthly charge on top of the yearly one. Not a chance in hell. I cancelled my Prime membership after 15 years over this move and have no regrets.
I hope I’m not alone in that. Prime Video is my least watched steaming service and waiting a few extra days for free shipping hasn’t been a big deal.
When cancelling there was no point where they asked why, which I found interesting.
I am a person who will pay to avoid ads. I have YouTube Premium and pay for the ad free Hulu tier. I also always pay extra to get the Kindle without ads, and pay to remove ads in any app I download within minutes. I even pay for my search engine (Kagi) instead of using Google or DDG. I’m the person they were after, but not like this.
I’m curious how many people they expected to pay for this. A modest price hike for everyone would likely have been more profitable and been mostly ignored by everyone. If they wanted to start breaking down the services to offer cheaper options to people looking for it, they should revamp the whole system. Present the 50 Prime offers and let people pick what they want, or have a few different bundles. Shipping and Videos were basically the only 2 things I used, so everything else was of no value to me.
I'd rather have them be forced to let me cancel Prime Video and discount my Prime membership by $8.99/month. If they are going to make Prime Video unusable to me by injecting ads, then I don't want to pay for it at all, but I do still want the other Prime benefits.
Seems like whole premise of Prime, and most Apple products for that matter, is to capitalize on the failure to enforce product tying that's illegal under both Sherman and Clayton.
... I thought the original premise of Prime was to take goods and services which, under basic economic theory, are more efficient centrally-funded by taxes, and provide those via a private entity. Especially things with zero marginal cost, like movies, music, and TV, should not be sold per-unit, but should be available to everyone and funded by taxes. Prime looked like a private equivalent to that.
If we all pay $3.5B per month (350M people times $10/month), that's enough to give us all the college textbooks, movies, software, and music we might want to use, as well as paying for a lot of transportation infrastructure for rapid shipping.
It seemed like a good model while Amazon was doing that.
Now it looks more like what you said.
Prime looks a lot more antitrusty in the model it's evolving to. I cancelled Prime about six months back, and Amazon is just obnoxious. There are ads on content I paid for. I can't check out without five annoying alerts. All those Prime deals look a lot less like deals and more like ways to bump up pricing for people who don't opt in. All in all, once I cancelled Amazon, it basically imploded on me, and now I only use it if there are seriously no other options.
That also pushes me away from any vendors who standardized on Amazon for logistics. All of a sudden, I realized non-Prime members just won't buy from you if you use Amazon for logistics.
It didn't used to be like that. Pre-Prime Amazon worked fine.
I found it amusing that just yesterday the Federal Comission for Competition (COFECE) in Mexico, gave a ruling to Amazon and one of its competitors Mercadolibre that they have to "unbundle" their video/streaming offerings from their "Prime" or "Plus" payment subscription, because they are distorting the market [1]. I just hope that they can follow up the ruling and don't succumb to Corporate pressure or corruption.
This, Netflix account-sharing blocking, and the ever increasing amount of streaming platforms (that mean an overall reduced catalogue per platform) leads me to believe we will see a resurgence in piracy.
The system is so blatantly rigged, why would you respect the "intellectual property" rights of people who are fleecing you? At this point I'm just ripping everything worth watching using tools like StreamFab, and encouraging everyone to do the same. Given how cheap local NAS storage is these days, you can easily have all your favorite videos and shows in one place. For bonus points, Plex has much better UI than Amazon.
"Went back" to piracy years ago... I actually pirated movies even when they were available on my Netflix subscription. I unsubscribed from Netflix when they started their descent into Netflix-only content.
What burns my cookies is that you pay the extra $3 for “ad-free” service and then Freevee still has ads. I thought Freevee was the way they sneaked in an ad-based service by just branding it differently. Are they going to add another $3 for “ad-free Freevee”?
Sure, but my point is they’ve just turned Prime into an ad-based business model, so what’s the point of Freevee now? Just merge the two and let me turn off all the ads.
It doesnt take much of an imagination to understand that amazon knew of the probability of a lawsuit, understands the probability of its success, and did the math on upside. With 3B on the line they can afford the lawyers, the appeals, the penalties, etc.
Get a seedbox for like 10 bucks a month, throw on Jellyfin, Radarr and Sonarr and never worry about this BS ever again.
I used to pay for Netflix and Prime. It keeps getting more fragmented, more expensive and more shittified.
Like Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. I'm willing to pay a reasonable monthly fee for a good service. Unfortunately the only ones providing that are pirates.
I’d love for a real economic discussion on what a fair price is. I agree with your point but not sure there is a price point consumers would tolerate and business could maintain a profitable business model with. That’s the fundamental issue we have right now.
I wonder what made Amazon go with this course of action.
Plenty of the other providers have done basically the same thing: the previous price now includes ads and you have to pay more to stay ad-free... but they've all done it by raising prices and introducing a lower with-ads tier.
To me it feels worse to have your service downgraded with the option to pay more to get it back than it does to have your price increased with the option to drop to a worse tier. That's sort of irrational, as the price increase is basically "opting you in" to pay more, but also just reflects how much ads suck.
In terms of Amazon's choice, my best guess is that it's a reaction to an effect I've seen other providers describe: the ads are so lucrative they actually earn more on the lower-tier customers.
I was delighted (as a former Amazon Prime customer) with not only how easy it was to cancel my membership... but that they refunded the entire year [I only had four months left].
Genuine legal question here: can this suit succeed as long as Amazon allows anyone to cancel their Prime membership with a refund of all remaining time?
You can subscribe to Prime monthly or yearly. Anecdotally, everywhere I've checked on forums, everyone who's contacted customer service to cancel their annual Prime membership has gotten a prorated refund (or even full refund in some cases). And I'm assuming that's probably their actual internal policy, specifically to avoid a lawsuit.
So if this is the case, is there any basis for this suit to succeed? It seems like it's wrong if Amazon changes the terms mid-subscription -- but it doesn't seem necessarily wrong for ongoing subscriptions if you can get out of it at any time.
>And I'm assuming that's probably their actual internal policy, specifically to avoid a lawsuit.
it might be to avoid a lawsuit, but it's probably not to avoid this specific lawsuit. when i cancelled my prime, i didn't have to give any reason why, i never told anybody it was because i was mad about getting ads on prime video. but i still got the pro-rated refund for the 6mo remaining in the subscription.
I guess next quarter is going to be a blowout. Amazon is pulling all kinds of levers in the name of profitability. AWS is now charging for [public IPV4 usage](https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/02/aws-ipv4-charges/) which will bring $1B in revenue.
The most important question, in my opinion, is will this class-action suit actually result in any meaningful change or will Bezos/Amazon scrape up some cash to make this "little lawsuit problem" go away?
So this is the cherry on top. After paying for a subscription you also have to pay to not get ads? That's lame. People should start boycotting Amazon right now.
I cancelled my Amazon Prime after this email. $2.99 isn't a lot, but I was already on the fence given all of their good shows were heading to the dumpster fire that is the + premium channels; Paramount+ AMC+ channels, etc.
So far I haven't missed it. I watch more YouTube than any of these services anymore.
What's worse is they locked Dolby Atmos and HDR behind the paid tier, something that used to be available normally. The Enshitification of Amazon continues.
I would dismiss such lawsuits and their plaintiffs as strange and persnickety if it weren't for...
Here in Australia, where the ads haven't been introduced yet, I got a notification from Amazon prompting to change to a yearly subscription because of the money I'd save. They've never prompted me thusly before.
I don't care about the extra dollars for ad free. It's just like raising the price of a service - which happens all the time. And what's more, it certainly WOULD benefit me to switch to yearly, which I never got around to doing.
But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Amazon is trying to lock people into year long contracts right before they change the terms. The deliberateness of THAT intent, the willingness to just so blatantly pinch from the pocket of the unwary - even if it's only a few bucks. That PISSES ME OFF.
Now I love capitalism - the right to own the sweat off your brow that stokes the competitive fires! It's the air we breathe. But these hyper-capitalist a-holes that would steal a cent if you just blink for a second... Goddamn. What makes these people?
That drop of sweat, that they didn't earn, joins the billions of others in a torrent of wealth being syphoned of the regular folk on a daily basis. And the world is growing parched.
So I salute the persnickety and fastidious Sir Wilbert Napoleon and everything he represent. I hope he wins.
