Amazon Prime Video major change to affect millions of users from next month

Last year was a major success for the best streaming services, with tonnes of great shows and movies to watch across all the major platforms, and the promise of plenty more to come. Amazon has been no stranger to this – check out 10 amazing forthcoming Amazon Prime shows – with the likes of Fallout also set to arrive on the service in the future. 

But Amazon has recently revealed more details about its biggest shake-up in years that could cause a whole other kind of fallout: Amazon Prime Video is set to introduce adverts to the streaming service, commencing 5 February 2024 in the UK (it's earlier, from 29 January, in the USA) unless you pay an additional monthly fee of £/$2.99.

Fans have been calling out the price rise – which, at £35.88 per year, adds over 37%, or a third of the price, to Amazon's £95 annual subscription fee (in the USA it's closer to a 25% addition to the $139 annual fee) – and, via the likes of Reddit, calling out whether the price rise makes the streaming service worth it anymore.

I must confess, it's a significant increase for an ad-free Prime Video, especially when Amazon not so long ago increased its pricing: in 2022 the membership went from £7.99 to £8.99 per month (although there was a stop-gap 'hack' to avoid that for the ongoing year after), while on the delivery side the service introduced a new price cap in 2023 to assure Same-Day delivery (otherwise an additional fee will be levied).

So, is it worth it? That's going to be subjective. But even if you do elect to pay the additional £/$2.99 per month you'll still be subject to adverts during live sporting events on the service. And while Amazon's official blog on the matter states that the company will "aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers", the actual figures on that aren't measurable – yet, anyway...

From my point of view I'm excited about what Amazon has upcoming: The Boys will be back for a new season and that's simply unmissable. Fallout, from the early stills previews, looks like it has heaps of potential. But many subscribers are saying the same thing (just look at Reddit's Frugal thread): rewarding such behaviour is to normalise it, so many are going ahead and calling on cancelling Amazon Prime as a result...