Say Farewell to a Streaming Era

The age of the ad-free streaming service (for no additional subscription cost) is essentially over: As expected, on Monday ads were introduced to Amazon's Prime Video streaming service. Now the five biggest streaming services (which also include Netflix, Disney+, Max, and Paramount+) are all ad-supported at their lowest price points, Gizmodo reports. One big difference in the Amazon rollout is that rather than first introducing a lower-cost tier with ads, as Netflix did, Amazon is keeping its price the same ($139/year for a full Amazon Prime membership, or $9/month for just the streaming service, CNET reports) and forcing those who don't want the newly introduced ads to pay an additional $3/month.

Hulu, Peacock, and other smaller streaming services also have ads on their lowest-cost tiers, with Apple TV+ being the only major streaming service without them—but it's also among the smallest, with only 25 million subscribers. Writes Maxwell Zeff at Gizmodo, "Streaming services once offered a strong alternative to cable, but as the landscape has become more competitive, they've all resorted to being just like their highly commercialized ancestors. ... The subscriber models for streaming services did not last long. We may be past a golden age of streaming, where companies were offering low-priced subscriptions for ad-free, premium content." (More Amazon Prime stories.)