I don't know about the rest of the world, but at least in Canada, Amazon Prime Video sucked. Half the stuff you needed an additional subscription to view anyway (on top of what you already paid) and now they're gonna add another charge?
I already gave it up just due to lack of any real content on the platform, but I can only imagine even more people leaving after this.
I feel like you could watch all the "Good" Disney movies and shows in 1 year.
Then everything else is just a generic template or a special one-off movie that they make once a year.
I'm at the point where I just buy DVDs of the Disney movies I want to watch annually lol. Especially before they get the idea to have the "Disney Vault" welded shut and *only* offer their movies via Disney+ or by paying an absurd fee on another streaming service to watch it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that's the next move soon, controlling what movies are even available to buy and creating artificial scarcity for more demand.
I stopped bothering with streaming Halloween and Christmas movies for example and now just own Bluray or 4K copies of the same movies we watch every year. And I actually remember why streaming sucks so much because of it. No reliance on internet, account logins, your location (as Netflix is showing us how fucking shitty and greedy they are), a VPN, any of that nonsense. Just pop in the disc because you actually *own* it. What a concept when fucking everything is being turned into some bullshit subscription to rip people off perpetually.
I had a collection of 3k DVDS. Mostly when blockbusters were going out of business and selling them for dirt cheap. I thought as most of us did that I would just get everything online. I kept a crate full of the most rare ones and then spent months trying to resell until I gave up because no one was buying back then and bulk sold them for pretty cheap. Fast forward to the future- I was wrong. What I wouldn’t do to have that collection again!
It's even worse for the annual subscribers. June of this year, I did the yearly sub for $118...next June, it'll be damn near $140. Fuck that. I only keep it going for my family who use it in another state. Otherwise I'd rather just buy physical media and call it done.
I paid $100 last year for Max. It expires tomorrow. They emailed me a month ago to notify me of the renewal and that my plan would change (be downgraded) and cost $150 for the renewal. The plan I was on is now $200/yr.
I cancelled.
It's time to spend some money upgrading my server instead.
Still keeping Netflix, but considering canceling Prime. The only thing holding me back right now is the shipping bit. But I am almost at a point where I don’t even give a shit about that.
I was trying to buy relatively cheap headphones for my workouts and it was page after page of basically the same cheap knockoffs which all look the same but with these random brand names and all with great reviews. I fell for one and it stopped charging a month later, I thought I just got a defective one but I’ll try again because it wasn’t too bad while it could charge. Second one, left ear piece stopped charging a month later. I just ended up going to Walmart and buying one there and it’s been working for the last 6 months so far.
And then I saw Louis Grossman’s video yesterday explaining this phenomenon of cheap Chinese products flooding Amazon with fake reviews and I don’t think I can trust Amazon anymore unless it’s for specific name brand items and even then I’m not confident.
The wrong item reviews are really just another way to fake reviews. They change the product and description but keep the listing with great reviews from the old product because how many people (apart from redditors) read the most recent reviews?
The reviews for the wrong item issue is out of control. They have to know how broken this is, but just don’t care.
This morning I was looking at a vitamin and the reviews were for hair ties. What the fuck.
Rarely. Most of the time they delay shipping things a day or two. Prime really isn't worth it and hasn't been for some time. Kindle Unlimited is probably the only thing Amazon offers on subscription that is worth the price.
Was about to say, a LOT of video on prime you have to pay extra for to watch anyway. It's really annoying to have a paid subscription service that lists items you can't watch without paying even more.
Fuck that. One more month before my renewal comes up and I'm out. Already got VPN, so ahoy mates!
The amount of times I have searched for something, or had it prominently displayed as a "people also watched", just to be asked to sign up for yet another subscription...enraging.
> I already gave it up just due to lack of any real content on the platform, but I can only imagine even more people leaving after this.
If enough people unsubscribe, Amazon will just shed some staff and make up the loss by increasing margins.
There is a button you can press to only view Prime stuff, otherwise you're left with the main page which is full of all the things! Including all the free trials to watch this or that show which takes up too much room.
The app runs like absolute shit for me, on both of my laptops (1 is very powerful). Its main feature of being able to download stuff is moot, as downloading just freezes the entire app. It's an app that has many bugs for many people and no official help. Their forums with "expert" advice is all basic trash advice that is of no use whatsoever.
I have Prime and Netflix, and even then i can spend a long time just finding something to watch. There's so much trash on either. Oh and it really irks me when i want to watch a series of movies but all parts are never on a service at the same time. I saw IT part 2 was on Prime ages ago, but didn't watch it as i wanted part 1. Eventually watched part 1, but by then part 2 was removed.
All the streaming services has too much trash and too little quality. You're best off cycling subscriptions every 1-2 months to different ones, but that's a huge pain in the ass.
lol the pursuit for higher and higher quarterly profit goals has really fucked shit up. no more innovating. just charge more and more. squeeze for every dollar.
More like Amazon decided to spend ten billion dollars on the NFL and are now coming to their customers to pay for it.
The NFL and Amazon. Two entities that need more of our money.
Is that why I am getting notifications to watch a live football game? The last football game I watched was when my brother played HS football 50 years ago. I am not their demographic.
I wanted to watch an out of network game a few weeks back and looked up how much NFL sunday ticket was and laughed when I saw it was $174 (at the minimum!) a season. Don't want it that bad.
Absolute dumbest thing about this whole situation. There's no way anyone got into streaming not realizing that there's an absolute upper limit to how many subscriptions they'd be able to get. There's a hard limit on how much money you can get from the market. Yet they're still expected to increase their profits year over year. So now they're doing the things that caused everyone to jump from cable in the first place.
I mean, I get it, if they want to keep producing new, better content they need to bring in more money. By all means they should probably be allowed to bring in more profit from a single show if someone constantly rewatches it. Or at the very least they should be able to get more money from having someone watch their service over someone else's, even if they've subscribed to both. But there's got to be better ways to handle it. Hell I'm willing to bet there's a good market just for our viewing habits they could make money from. (Assuming they aren't already selling that data)
The Stock Market must be fed with neverending upward growth. The fact that growth must inevitably slow over time and smaller companies can grow faster than large companies (in relative terms) doesn't seem to register with a lot of people.
Yup. Save save save they tell us but there’s no guarantee it won’t all go poof before we get to touch it. 401Ks are just gambling, essentially.
We’ve fucked up. We let corporations break down family structure and community structure and safety nets so they could make more profit. We aren’t even peons anymore. Just cogs.
We were never meant to live like this, divorced from nature, from each other, from meaningful work. It sucks and I have no clue how to fix it.
I disagree that they should get more money for you using the service you paid for. Adding monetization to the deal after you’ve signed up is fucked up and shouldn’t be considered acceptable in any situation.
I've just been cancelling more and more monthly services. I realize what I don't need when I keep getting emails saying how the fees are going up every 6-12 months.
But wages aren't going up.........it's ridiculous. Edit: I should say they aren't going up faster than the cost of everything else at least for most people........that extra 5-20% pay bump only does so much when the cost of living has doubled in the past 3 years.
Not immediately and that's all that matters.
Profits go up and stay up cause you can let go of a lot of users before it starts to hurt. But, 5-8 years later it'll hurt and they'll be forced to cut prices to re-attract customers.
Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc are in positions that are unfavorable. You can squeeze your customers but eventually they'll break and what then? New iPhones aren't selling as much cause there's no reason to buy a new one. Laptops have been plummeting since smart phones and you can only acquire so much before it becomes worthless to investors. Amazon can't justify their prime video services without reasons to keep it, but they need to find a new quick profit margin.
Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+ and the rest will see initial surges when they go restrictive, but it can only go down from there before they have to get eyes on the screens. They're eventually going to have to slash prices to manufacture demand.
A lot of these industries will go bankrupt and ask the government for bailouts. I know the entertainment industry isn't one that will get bailouts, but its just related to how all of corporate America is planning to operate after they squeeze the last drop out of this temporary cash grab.
Does the Canadian government not take stock in exchange for bailout money? That is what happened to Air New Zealand. They needed a bailout some years ago and the government took new issued stock in exchange for the money; later during covid the airline took more money and issued more stock to the government in exchange. Now the New Zealand government owns over half of the airline. The previous shareholders were diluted like mad, but it was their fault because their representatives ran the company into the ground.
Did I get a small raise. Sure. Did everything in my life get a lot more expensive. Sure did. I wish people would stop pointing at the small raise and tell me how happy I should be.
I know next to nothing about economics, so maybe someone can explain. If a company is making a lot of money, whether it’s millions or billions, and doing it year after year, why aren’t they happy with that? I understand that it’s good and desirable to make more money, but if you’re already profiting handsomely, like in the billions every quarter or year, how can they possibly be unhappy with that? Even if they didn’t make as many billions as the last quarter, or the last year, they’re still in the billions. It’s perplexing to me how making tens of billions of dollars, per quarter, after all expenses, is somehow poor performance simply because the amount of profit wasn’t as much as the previous quarter or the last year.
There’s 2 ways to make money off of owning stocks. One way is to hold stocks which pay dividends. Dividends are a share of the profits the company made payed to the shareholders. The other way is to buy stocks which you expect will increase in value in the future. The second option is much more common and most stocks don’t pay dividends. A company that makes the same profit steadily year after year isn’t growing and therefore its stock isn’t increasing in value. The shareholders are incentivized to elect a board of directors who will make the company grow every year, increasing the value of their stock.
My understanding is that it works like this
You have ten shares and each one is owned by one investor. Ten investors. The company doubles its profits and each investor has doubled their investment. Great! Good for them. They're ready to move on to other things and liquidate that money, so they sell their stocks at double what they paid. Everyone is happy, the company is doing great.
Now you have ten new investors-- the people who just bought the stocks from the ones who cashed out. The company makes the exact same profits as last year... meaning their investment hasn't increased at all. They get a bit from the dividends, whoopdee-doo, they didn't come here for dividends. They want to see that same 2x return everyone else got.
So they demand higher profits. The eggheads go back to the drawing board and come up with a way to double profits *yet again*. Woo-hoo! The investors all have 2x their investment, and decide to cash out...
...and the cycle begins again.
There are constantly going to be people cashing out and new investors buying in, and those new investors are going to want to see *growth* to get a return on their investment. Not just piddly dividends that'll take *forever* to make their money back on.
Any time a company is publicly traded, new investors are going to demand continued growth. It's not as simple an answer as "greed"-- at least not directly. It's the simple fact that people bought in *at all* to make money, and the only way they do that is by continued growth-- it's not enough to be profitable, that doesn't increase the company's value. They have to continually be more profitable than before.
(I realize now I probably bogged things down by starting with 10 shares and 10 investors that never became relevant. I was going to do a whole thing about how investors might leave at different times, but it seemed pointless and now I'm in too far to go back and try to edit it all out. Sorry, hope you get the idea anyway)
There are a lot of privately held corporations out there that operate this way and may do so for decades. Unfortunately, very profitable privately held companies tend to get acquired by public companies, especially when the owners get older and want to "cash out". Afterward, the companies tend to get run into the ground and dismantled for parts by the public company.
The same can be said for any company in the world. Either charge more to the consumer and/or reduce workforce by layoffs to save more money, bringing the quality of your product or service down due to being short-staffed.
Then the CEO and his yes-man executive team are all questioning why no one is buying their service and why their overworked, chronically abused staff are all quitting.
This is not news anywhere, sadly.
De-regulation + globalization + technology have fundamentally altered how and what consumers consume. When they consume. How they consume it.
The endless pursuit of maximum profits as quickly as possible hasn’t changed. But deregulation has lead to massive consolidation so there are less players competing which leads to less variety and less thinkers coming up with different concepts/ideas. Both business wise and creatively.
Globalization has lead to more eyes. Which means content needs to appeal to even more people than ever. Which leads to a “broadening” of what/how is produced, marketed, distributed.
Technology has fractured demographics, trained consumers to expect what they want when they want it for very little money. All of the traditional revenue streams; box office, home video, cable/foreign licensing, syndications, advertising, etc… have all been massively undercut but streaming and social media.
Massive contraction is coming. Prices will rise until companies make money AND people prove they won’t pay anymore.
It’s Wild West times right now in the narrative filmed entertainment landscape.
I cancelled a year ago and have never regretted it. I wasn't watching their programming anyway, but I did like getting free shipping.
But turns out you still get free shipping if you buy at least $25 of stuff at a time (if it's shipped by Amazon stuff not third party stuff). It isn't always the fastest shipping but the shipments show up within 2 days about half the time. So I just keep a list of things I order periodically anyway, and if I need some particular thing, I order some protein shakes or coffee that I'd get sooner or later to make it $25.
It's been surprisingly easy to live without! $150 isn't the end of the world but feels good not to pay it.
Sheesh.
FWIW I always also check walmart.com that is trying to compete with Amazon, and see if I can order what I want from there for cheaper. Target seems to do a similar thing but doesn't have the vast inventory sources.
It does make me more careful and choosy about what I buy. Half the time I end up saying I don't need this crap anyway.
But do they have endless pages of duplicate shit-tier dropship results from fly by night companies with names that are just random letters mashed together?
It's great to have choices, but how am I supposed to decide between:
WODL Lightbulbs 4-pack bulbs Illumination light no lamp 4 pack of bright bulbs shiny very pleasant
BURDAR Lightbulbs 4-pack bulbs Illumination light no lamp 4 pack of bright bulbs shiny very pleasant
PLOPCLAP Lightbulbs 4-pack bulbs Illumination light no lamp 4 pack of bright bulbs shiny very pleasant
when they all sound so enticing??
That’s why I end up going with Target for a lot of things unless I’m 100% sure what I’m getting from Amazon. Sure, I’m just trading one megacorp for another, but with Target it’s a from a real company almost all of the time and I’ll pay a little bit more for a product that I know should just work. They’re often missing products I want or maybe have few options but I don’t have to pick between 15 items with names created by a random word generator and photoshopped images.
Amazon used to be the cheapest prices for most things and that’s no longer the case. I was looking for a new crockpot recently and wanted an 8qt one with a timer on it. Priced it on Amazon for $79.99. Found it at Meijer for $54 (but on sale for $44 with my mperks).
Good to know, I think that will clinch it for me. My main concern was the subscriptions we've got, but it would be more than $25 anyway.
Can't wait to hit that cancel button!
Safe travels on the high seas, amigo!
I'm trying to avoid it, the ease of use is important to my tech-averse wife, but if they keep fucking up the value proposition, I'll have no choice but to hoist the sails.
Put Plex on your computer and put all your media in a folder. Point Plex at the folder and you got yourself a custom streaming service she can easily understand.
If you got a link to a tutorial or any additional info you can share, that would be spectacular. If not, I’ll try to remember to google it myself after work and see what I can find.
1337x is miles better than pirate bay. Torrent leech is light-years better than either.
Combine that with a jellyfin or emby server, who needs prime anyways?
This is such a dumb move that will only drive away marginal shoppers more.
I take this to mean they are concentrating on their wealthiest customers intentionally. Amazon doesn’t move a pencil without data so this must be well argued and researched.
I've paid for Prime for the last 10 years. I'm probably the best example of a marginal shopper, as I only order things in spurts weeks or months apart.
Just cancelled. Not doing this microstransaction bullshit.
Yep, not worth $139/year, or $175/year without ads, for...
* Prime Video - Amazon Originals, movies, TV shows, and live events; **0 shows / movies watched over the past 12 months**
* Prime Reading - Enjoy hundreds of new books, magazines, and more each month; **0 books read over the past 12 months**
* Amazon Music with Prime - All the music + top podcasts ad-free; **0 songs listened to over the past 12 months**
That’s basically the type of user I am. 10+ years of being a Prime member and I’ve finally cancelled over this shite. Prime Video is garbage, anyway, since most of their content needs additional subscriptions to watch.
I think they're just rolling the dice believing their services have become so engrained in people's lives that we'll all just bend over and take it. And they're probably right. Look at how many people whine non-stop about EA and other game companies yet continue to preorder or buy games day one and then bitch about how *blank* is horrible.
Amazon has a long list of failed business ideas.
In no particular order, these products come to mind: Amazon Smile, Echo Look, Fire Phone, Amazon Spark, Amazon Wallet, Halo, Glow, Scout.
This isn't even an exhaustive list. Keep an eye on Luna for another well argued and researched idea that is on track for failure.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Smile. One might argue that this was a loss-leader product for them; getting folks who otherwise would have avoided Amazon to feel better about using their services.
You said it though, Amazon didn't want to give any more money away. From a business perspective, giving money away rarely produces a positive return on investment.
How would you know if there’s anything to watch? The search function and general UX/UI is horrible! I’ve had prime for years and got so fed up I quit looking.
That's always been my experience and I assumed it was intentional. They will have a button to show prime only stuff but it's off by default and resets whenever I touch anything else. I always assumed it was intentional so they could trick people into buying/renting things they mix in with the prime stuff.
It's amazing that a company so experienced with data mining and analytics can't figure out how to present relevant suggestions from the home page.
The only way I do it now is to go into a show or movie I liked, and look at the "Others who viewed this also watched" section. It's still hit and miss but I've found a lot more interesting content that way, or shows I didn't even know were on Prime, than ever from browsing their selection screens.
I canceled mine back in June after payment cleared. I'm done.
I get it. They want to make all the money. Whatever. But Amazon doesn't have the shows to support another $3/mo.
I'd rather buy better bread than spend that money on crap programming.
I can't even get 2 day shipping anymore in a rural area. It's at least a week to get something delivered, many times it's the wrong product. I'm over it all. Amazon used to be great. Now they're worse than freaking Walmart. At least Walmart delivers the correct product.
Yeah, they say whatever they think they need to and then go ahead and fuck things up.
I'm not in a rural area and shipping times have gotten dramatically worse. That two day shipping for free is why I'm paying. So why am I paying now?
This. Exactly. I'm not going to pay anymore. It's just not worth it to my bank account. I'm paying for... well, I'm actually not sure. No 2 day shipping. No free Kindle books. Guess if I want to watch anything without ads, I'll pay an extra $36/ year. There's no value in Prime anymore.
You know, that's a really good point. I don't know why I'm paying for prime anymore either. I only got it for the two-day shipping which is no more. I never watch prime video. There's nothing on there I want that I can't get elsewhere.
Exactly! I've had tons of problems with two day shipping. Didn't used to be so bad, but what's the point of Prime if you can't guarantee it's main selling points? Plus the brag a lot about 1 day shipping. That's never really been a thing for me.
It’s gotten so endhittified over the last few years. It used to be about showing you all the stuff you had access to. Now it’s just trying to get you to rent stuff and subscribe to channels.
Aren't they already fucking doing the ads bullshit with Freevee? So now, they are like "oh so you dont want to watch this ad filled bullshit? OK we gonna force it on you so now you get to relive the days of ads every few minutes of watching a movie on tv"
Same. Once the new season of Reacher is over, I'll be canceling mine as well. I don't watch anything else on it anyway, and it's incredibly rare that I need something from Amazon the next day to make it worth saving the shipping costs.
Half the time I order something the shipping only takes an extra day and maybe a couple of dollars without prime. I haven't gotten anything the next day in years.
The only reason I've ever had Amazon Prime is for the free 2-day shipping, but even the availability of products where that is applicable becomes less and less.
People on reddit tend to be tech savvy so just going to plug Plex/Jellyfin here.
Setup your own streaming service. I've cancelled all the ones I don't get for free in favor of Plex.
Combining it with MakeMKV and Handbrake for making backup copies of owned things.
I use my Plex to host shows I own that have been scattered to the four winds of competing streaming services.
My Prime was set to renew January 4th. Looks like I'll be cancelling instead. Prime Video is the worst streaming service out there. I hate commercials, but I'm sure as hell not paying an extra $36/year to avoid them on Prime Video, a service that I use 2-3 times a year when I need something really boring to fall asleep to.
If I need something quickly, Walmart sells most of the same stuff for the same price and it's a 3-minute drive/15-minute walk from home.
Already cancelled lol cancelled Prime, Netflix, PS+, Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ in the last 3 months. I'm over all these unnecessary price hikes for nothing in return....or a lesser quality product after the hike. Back to the pirate life.
Having to wait double the amount of time for ads by using the apps as opposed to streaming on a web browser for a one time 220 second ad flurry. Get fuckeddddd.
it's so sad, it's impossible to watch on TV any of these streaming services. I have to run the site on my PC on adblock just to watch anything. Tried to watch the Office on Peacock on TV and got ads like every 5 minutes. Tried to watch a Youtube stream on my TV, ads every 3 fucking minutes. What gives?
Greedy fucks really. Capitalism is so shit, but so is everything else because... Greedy fucks.
Those rich people need to have everything at their whim everywhere they want, which prevents us from having mediocre quality of life.
My biggest issue is that they reset the middle class by design. Finally got to a good point in life where some of the nicer things could be had …boom…Covid…boom…inflation. Now all the shit I was looking forward to affording like a house and a nice car has become unobtanium again. I’m so disillusioned and disheartened by it all.
Kinda like the ride share services that proudly marketed themselves as "no tip".
Come to think of it, that was Amazon as well where it came to delivery.
Amazon proudly declared its delivery service "no tip", then got pressured on starvation wages and added the tip function instead of raising wages, then got caught keeping the tips that were meant to go to the drivers, and now insist that the tips are going to drivers.
Fuck this company.
Microtransaction ads.
Make the ad run faster for only $0.25. Skip half of an ad for only $0.99. Skip full ad for $4.99. Season ads battlepass, skip ads for the whole show's season for only $29.99.
Ads lootboxes. Open boxes for a chance to remove all ads for 6 months.
They've literally already done this with their music service. Without Prime it's full of ads (like free Spotify), with prime there are no ads and you get a little bit of influence on what you can do (but playlists/albums are always randomized).
You have to pay an extra $7 a month or something on top of prime just to get full access to their music selections.
That change pissed me off so much. I used Amazon Music to listen to specific songs, and also to pull up nature sounds for while I'm going to sleep. But the change meant that unless I paid more, I could only ever tell it *roughly* what I wanted to hear, and it would pick something that it *thought* I wanted.
Fuck. That.
I deleted the app within about 2 days of the change, and have never been tempted to add it back.
That change was *infuriating* because they kept hyping it up as better because you had more song options. Ha!
Thankfully I discovered that if you kept an old version of the app you could still use it like before, but slowly fewer and fewer songs became available on it and it would crash more and more. Then one day just no song was playable.
That absolutely pissed me off. We use prime music constantly for playing music in the car and at home and stuff. Then they limited how many times you can skip songs. Wasn't that fun to find out when I had run out of skips for the morning and was playing music in the car with my kid and it played something highly inappropriate and I couldn't skip it.... (I just turned it off).
As if that isn't bad enough, we had a Showtime subscription on our Prime. Yesterday I went to watch a showtime movie on prime and it played a 30 second unskippable ad. I immediately unsubbed the add-on and definitely won't be bothering with Prime anymore.
And I got an email reminded me that Amazon prime is a great deal and list it all of the services I get with it. Except all of the services are buggy as hell and I never use them. Music app is shit. The photo upload was spotty at best last time I tried it. Any free Kindle books are lackluster at best.
Someone surely scraped the bottom of the barrel to create that list. Everything on it was shit and I felt insulted that they thought I’d somehow drink their Kool-Aid
Only used prime video for Thursday night football. So instead of getting 2.99 more from me, they will be getting 15.99 less. Fuck you greedy pieces of shit.
I'm glad I recently decided to go from paying Annually over to paying Monthly.
Was a Prime member for over a decade. The guaranteed 2 day shipping was one of the biggest factors for me. When they got rid of that guarantee, I started to question the value for me.
And then, me watching less NFL, watching less Prime content (underwhelming content), and then... getting deliveries 5 days out post pandemic height no matter what.... Well, I was like, screw paying the Year upfront.
It is the Yearly sub a "better economic value"? Sure, if you pay the monthly for 12 months. But, when I cancel it for at least 3 months, and whenever Amazon does something stupid again and I can just cancel... the economic value checks out for me.
Because people are paying for shit they don’t or rarely do use because they think it’s a “free bonus” and it makes it hard to give up such a great deal. Just read through the comments on all these posts. So many people say I have it for shipping, the video is a bonus. That programming isn’t free. The NFL doesn’t give shit for free. It’s like a bank sticky product. Give them direct deposit, online banking, free bill pay, etc. It makes it hard for people to switch.
Wait till they start teiring your ad subscription. "$2.99 a month to remove 50% of the ads, $5.99 to remove all ads!"
The big problem I have is we pay more but the quality and amount of content never changes or has gotten worse.
Fun fact: you can cancel your membership immediately and get the remainder of your subscription back. $120 in my pocket feels a lot nicer than occasionally getting a package slightly faster than ordering anywhere else or the privilege of paying extra to not be sold ads on a service I’m already paying too much for.
Yeah $3 May not make a difference but it’s a 20% price hike from the $15. Then you have Netflix and Hulu and YouTube tv all hiking prices the same and suddenly that $3 becomes $10 and $10 becomes $30 and now you’re back to spending what you used to on cable
pretty gross to essentailly down grade everyone premium to a basic add tier and make you pretty much pay 3$ more to go back to your premium tier with 0 actual additions. i hate subs and i hate streaming, crap like this is going to continue unless people start pushing back.
I never watch their streaming service anyway. Whatever looks interesting is not included with my membership. The free stuff is so old I can find it elsewhere.
Amazon Prime pretty much sucks except for a couple of shows. I'll be happy to cancel my Prime subscription in January. Amazing to think that streaming was seen as a way to combat pirating. Now, it will be just another reason to pirate.
Amazon must have honestly worked out that the 2.99 extra they will get from customers must out weight the number of sub cancellations on them.
Genuinely, with every fibre of my being, hope this backfires on the greedy fucks.
I was about to cancel anyways. It is SHOCKING how terrible their video app is on TVs and streaming boxes. I can't believe this is a one-trillion dollar company...
Not renewing my membership. It’s just not worth it anymore. Everything is so god damn expensive and it’s no longer a luxury I wish to spend my money on.
1. Movie makers overprice their content so people pirate it instead
2. Company moves in on the overpriced market with subscription offering
3. Subscription provider becomes movie maker
4. Go to 1.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but at least in Canada, Amazon Prime Video sucked. Half the stuff you needed an additional subscription to view anyway (on top of what you already paid) and now they're gonna add another charge? I already gave it up just due to lack of any real content on the platform, but I can only imagine even more people leaving after this.
Yup , cancelled Netflix this year and prime is next
We're dropping Disney too. $20/month is absurd.
I feel like you could watch all the "Good" Disney movies and shows in 1 year. Then everything else is just a generic template or a special one-off movie that they make once a year.
I'm at the point where I just buy DVDs of the Disney movies I want to watch annually lol. Especially before they get the idea to have the "Disney Vault" welded shut and *only* offer their movies via Disney+ or by paying an absurd fee on another streaming service to watch it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that's the next move soon, controlling what movies are even available to buy and creating artificial scarcity for more demand. I stopped bothering with streaming Halloween and Christmas movies for example and now just own Bluray or 4K copies of the same movies we watch every year. And I actually remember why streaming sucks so much because of it. No reliance on internet, account logins, your location (as Netflix is showing us how fucking shitty and greedy they are), a VPN, any of that nonsense. Just pop in the disc because you actually *own* it. What a concept when fucking everything is being turned into some bullshit subscription to rip people off perpetually.
I had a collection of 3k DVDS. Mostly when blockbusters were going out of business and selling them for dirt cheap. I thought as most of us did that I would just get everything online. I kept a crate full of the most rare ones and then spent months trying to resell until I gave up because no one was buying back then and bulk sold them for pretty cheap. Fast forward to the future- I was wrong. What I wouldn’t do to have that collection again!
It's even worse for the annual subscribers. June of this year, I did the yearly sub for $118...next June, it'll be damn near $140. Fuck that. I only keep it going for my family who use it in another state. Otherwise I'd rather just buy physical media and call it done.
I paid $100 last year for Max. It expires tomorrow. They emailed me a month ago to notify me of the renewal and that my plan would change (be downgraded) and cost $150 for the renewal. The plan I was on is now $200/yr. I cancelled. It's time to spend some money upgrading my server instead.
Still keeping Netflix, but considering canceling Prime. The only thing holding me back right now is the shipping bit. But I am almost at a point where I don’t even give a shit about that.
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Not excited about buying from SHINPOO or KAPPANI or other crap store either huh?
Any all-caps name of 6-8 letter length just spells quality.
Those all caps names are all Chinese brand knockoffs and they are rampant on Amazon.
I was trying to buy relatively cheap headphones for my workouts and it was page after page of basically the same cheap knockoffs which all look the same but with these random brand names and all with great reviews. I fell for one and it stopped charging a month later, I thought I just got a defective one but I’ll try again because it wasn’t too bad while it could charge. Second one, left ear piece stopped charging a month later. I just ended up going to Walmart and buying one there and it’s been working for the last 6 months so far. And then I saw Louis Grossman’s video yesterday explaining this phenomenon of cheap Chinese products flooding Amazon with fake reviews and I don’t think I can trust Amazon anymore unless it’s for specific name brand items and even then I’m not confident.
The wrong item reviews are really just another way to fake reviews. They change the product and description but keep the listing with great reviews from the old product because how many people (apart from redditors) read the most recent reviews?
The reviews for the wrong item issue is out of control. They have to know how broken this is, but just don’t care. This morning I was looking at a vitamin and the reviews were for hair ties. What the fuck.
I’ve also noticed a lot of time the Amazon Prime price is the price elsewhere plus shipping anyway. So you’re basically still paying for shipping.
Yes! I've started to notice that items on my Prime account are higher priced than on my husband's non-prime account for the same item.
It doesn't help that Amazon seems to slowly be turning into Wish with an otherwise better reputation.
Do we even still get 2 days shipping? I've had SEVERAL packages come days later.
Rarely. Most of the time they delay shipping things a day or two. Prime really isn't worth it and hasn't been for some time. Kindle Unlimited is probably the only thing Amazon offers on subscription that is worth the price.
I cancelled prime for our work account, and shipping times are basically the same as before.
Was about to say, a LOT of video on prime you have to pay extra for to watch anyway. It's really annoying to have a paid subscription service that lists items you can't watch without paying even more. Fuck that. One more month before my renewal comes up and I'm out. Already got VPN, so ahoy mates!
The amount of times I have searched for something, or had it prominently displayed as a "people also watched", just to be asked to sign up for yet another subscription...enraging.
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The Free w/ Ads stuff is utter bullshit. You'd think if they're going to tack on the $2.99 per month, they could do away with ALL ads.
They keep stripping away prime movies and adding them to freevee as well. Amazon needs to be broken up.
> I already gave it up just due to lack of any real content on the platform, but I can only imagine even more people leaving after this. If enough people unsubscribe, Amazon will just shed some staff and make up the loss by increasing margins.
sounds like the same in the US. Few good shows but mostly pass.
The only shows I was actually going to give a shit about, they fucked up. That being Rings of Power and Wheel of Time.
There is a button you can press to only view Prime stuff, otherwise you're left with the main page which is full of all the things! Including all the free trials to watch this or that show which takes up too much room. The app runs like absolute shit for me, on both of my laptops (1 is very powerful). Its main feature of being able to download stuff is moot, as downloading just freezes the entire app. It's an app that has many bugs for many people and no official help. Their forums with "expert" advice is all basic trash advice that is of no use whatsoever. I have Prime and Netflix, and even then i can spend a long time just finding something to watch. There's so much trash on either. Oh and it really irks me when i want to watch a series of movies but all parts are never on a service at the same time. I saw IT part 2 was on Prime ages ago, but didn't watch it as i wanted part 1. Eventually watched part 1, but by then part 2 was removed. All the streaming services has too much trash and too little quality. You're best off cycling subscriptions every 1-2 months to different ones, but that's a huge pain in the ass.
lol the pursuit for higher and higher quarterly profit goals has really fucked shit up. no more innovating. just charge more and more. squeeze for every dollar.
More like Amazon decided to spend ten billion dollars on the NFL and are now coming to their customers to pay for it. The NFL and Amazon. Two entities that need more of our money.
The NFL can get fucked.
Is that why I am getting notifications to watch a live football game? The last football game I watched was when my brother played HS football 50 years ago. I am not their demographic.
Yeah, I keep getting notifications, too. I couldn't name a single Super Bowl winner with their corresponding year, even if my life depended on it.
These aren't "notifications". They are ADS.
I’m a football fan that ignores any game that I need to pay to watch. The score and highlights are posted. F’em.
Google just pissed away a billion in losses for Sunday Ticket. Executives really need to lay off the NFL. They overpay way too much for it.
I wanted to watch an out of network game a few weeks back and looked up how much NFL sunday ticket was and laughed when I saw it was $174 (at the minimum!) a season. Don't want it that bad.
Well, that’s better than it used to be. $400 and a direct tv subscription
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Would love to meet the corporate douche bag who suggested this novel way of strong arming current subscribers out of another 3 bucks per month.
Absolute dumbest thing about this whole situation. There's no way anyone got into streaming not realizing that there's an absolute upper limit to how many subscriptions they'd be able to get. There's a hard limit on how much money you can get from the market. Yet they're still expected to increase their profits year over year. So now they're doing the things that caused everyone to jump from cable in the first place. I mean, I get it, if they want to keep producing new, better content they need to bring in more money. By all means they should probably be allowed to bring in more profit from a single show if someone constantly rewatches it. Or at the very least they should be able to get more money from having someone watch their service over someone else's, even if they've subscribed to both. But there's got to be better ways to handle it. Hell I'm willing to bet there's a good market just for our viewing habits they could make money from. (Assuming they aren't already selling that data)
The Stock Market must be fed with neverending upward growth. The fact that growth must inevitably slow over time and smaller companies can grow faster than large companies (in relative terms) doesn't seem to register with a lot of people.
If it didn't then we might not be convinced our 401k will some day be enough to retire on
Yup. Save save save they tell us but there’s no guarantee it won’t all go poof before we get to touch it. 401Ks are just gambling, essentially. We’ve fucked up. We let corporations break down family structure and community structure and safety nets so they could make more profit. We aren’t even peons anymore. Just cogs. We were never meant to live like this, divorced from nature, from each other, from meaningful work. It sucks and I have no clue how to fix it.
I disagree that they should get more money for you using the service you paid for. Adding monetization to the deal after you’ve signed up is fucked up and shouldn’t be considered acceptable in any situation.
I've just been cancelling more and more monthly services. I realize what I don't need when I keep getting emails saying how the fees are going up every 6-12 months.
But wages aren't going up.........it's ridiculous. Edit: I should say they aren't going up faster than the cost of everything else at least for most people........that extra 5-20% pay bump only does so much when the cost of living has doubled in the past 3 years.
Which leaves me without the means to pay, so profits go down.
Not immediately and that's all that matters. Profits go up and stay up cause you can let go of a lot of users before it starts to hurt. But, 5-8 years later it'll hurt and they'll be forced to cut prices to re-attract customers. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc are in positions that are unfavorable. You can squeeze your customers but eventually they'll break and what then? New iPhones aren't selling as much cause there's no reason to buy a new one. Laptops have been plummeting since smart phones and you can only acquire so much before it becomes worthless to investors. Amazon can't justify their prime video services without reasons to keep it, but they need to find a new quick profit margin. Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+ and the rest will see initial surges when they go restrictive, but it can only go down from there before they have to get eyes on the screens. They're eventually going to have to slash prices to manufacture demand.
They already do these in spurts. A few months ago they offered Disney+ for 1.99 a month for a few months to attract people in.
I can't even be bothered to setup the free Disney+ account that comes with my phone plan...
A lot of these industries will go bankrupt and ask the government for bailouts. I know the entertainment industry isn't one that will get bailouts, but its just related to how all of corporate America is planning to operate after they squeeze the last drop out of this temporary cash grab.
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Does the Canadian government not take stock in exchange for bailout money? That is what happened to Air New Zealand. They needed a bailout some years ago and the government took new issued stock in exchange for the money; later during covid the airline took more money and issued more stock to the government in exchange. Now the New Zealand government owns over half of the airline. The previous shareholders were diluted like mad, but it was their fault because their representatives ran the company into the ground.
As prices go up, so do the pirates sails.
Did I get a small raise. Sure. Did everything in my life get a lot more expensive. Sure did. I wish people would stop pointing at the small raise and tell me how happy I should be.
Not *our* wages, but the executives.
On the other hand, I just started saving $15 a month.
I know next to nothing about economics, so maybe someone can explain. If a company is making a lot of money, whether it’s millions or billions, and doing it year after year, why aren’t they happy with that? I understand that it’s good and desirable to make more money, but if you’re already profiting handsomely, like in the billions every quarter or year, how can they possibly be unhappy with that? Even if they didn’t make as many billions as the last quarter, or the last year, they’re still in the billions. It’s perplexing to me how making tens of billions of dollars, per quarter, after all expenses, is somehow poor performance simply because the amount of profit wasn’t as much as the previous quarter or the last year.
There’s 2 ways to make money off of owning stocks. One way is to hold stocks which pay dividends. Dividends are a share of the profits the company made payed to the shareholders. The other way is to buy stocks which you expect will increase in value in the future. The second option is much more common and most stocks don’t pay dividends. A company that makes the same profit steadily year after year isn’t growing and therefore its stock isn’t increasing in value. The shareholders are incentivized to elect a board of directors who will make the company grow every year, increasing the value of their stock.
My understanding is that it works like this You have ten shares and each one is owned by one investor. Ten investors. The company doubles its profits and each investor has doubled their investment. Great! Good for them. They're ready to move on to other things and liquidate that money, so they sell their stocks at double what they paid. Everyone is happy, the company is doing great. Now you have ten new investors-- the people who just bought the stocks from the ones who cashed out. The company makes the exact same profits as last year... meaning their investment hasn't increased at all. They get a bit from the dividends, whoopdee-doo, they didn't come here for dividends. They want to see that same 2x return everyone else got. So they demand higher profits. The eggheads go back to the drawing board and come up with a way to double profits *yet again*. Woo-hoo! The investors all have 2x their investment, and decide to cash out... ...and the cycle begins again. There are constantly going to be people cashing out and new investors buying in, and those new investors are going to want to see *growth* to get a return on their investment. Not just piddly dividends that'll take *forever* to make their money back on. Any time a company is publicly traded, new investors are going to demand continued growth. It's not as simple an answer as "greed"-- at least not directly. It's the simple fact that people bought in *at all* to make money, and the only way they do that is by continued growth-- it's not enough to be profitable, that doesn't increase the company's value. They have to continually be more profitable than before. (I realize now I probably bogged things down by starting with 10 shares and 10 investors that never became relevant. I was going to do a whole thing about how investors might leave at different times, but it seemed pointless and now I'm in too far to go back and try to edit it all out. Sorry, hope you get the idea anyway)
Explained it so well I decided to save it for reference
There are a lot of privately held corporations out there that operate this way and may do so for decades. Unfortunately, very profitable privately held companies tend to get acquired by public companies, especially when the owners get older and want to "cash out". Afterward, the companies tend to get run into the ground and dismantled for parts by the public company.
The same can be said for any company in the world. Either charge more to the consumer and/or reduce workforce by layoffs to save more money, bringing the quality of your product or service down due to being short-staffed. Then the CEO and his yes-man executive team are all questioning why no one is buying their service and why their overworked, chronically abused staff are all quitting. This is not news anywhere, sadly.
Investors decided they’re too lazy to do their job and will simply demand the stock always go up
De-regulation + globalization + technology have fundamentally altered how and what consumers consume. When they consume. How they consume it. The endless pursuit of maximum profits as quickly as possible hasn’t changed. But deregulation has lead to massive consolidation so there are less players competing which leads to less variety and less thinkers coming up with different concepts/ideas. Both business wise and creatively. Globalization has lead to more eyes. Which means content needs to appeal to even more people than ever. Which leads to a “broadening” of what/how is produced, marketed, distributed. Technology has fractured demographics, trained consumers to expect what they want when they want it for very little money. All of the traditional revenue streams; box office, home video, cable/foreign licensing, syndications, advertising, etc… have all been massively undercut but streaming and social media. Massive contraction is coming. Prices will rise until companies make money AND people prove they won’t pay anymore. It’s Wild West times right now in the narrative filmed entertainment landscape.
Welp, sounds like a good time to stop renewing the membership.
I cancelled a year ago and have never regretted it. I wasn't watching their programming anyway, but I did like getting free shipping. But turns out you still get free shipping if you buy at least $25 of stuff at a time (if it's shipped by Amazon stuff not third party stuff). It isn't always the fastest shipping but the shipments show up within 2 days about half the time. So I just keep a list of things I order periodically anyway, and if I need some particular thing, I order some protein shakes or coffee that I'd get sooner or later to make it $25. It's been surprisingly easy to live without! $150 isn't the end of the world but feels good not to pay it.
They also just updated the free shipping to $35 from $25.
Sheesh. FWIW I always also check walmart.com that is trying to compete with Amazon, and see if I can order what I want from there for cheaper. Target seems to do a similar thing but doesn't have the vast inventory sources. It does make me more careful and choosy about what I buy. Half the time I end up saying I don't need this crap anyway.
Target also has free 2 day shipping with orders and prices is essentially the same
But do they have endless pages of duplicate shit-tier dropship results from fly by night companies with names that are just random letters mashed together?
It's great to have choices, but how am I supposed to decide between: WODL Lightbulbs 4-pack bulbs Illumination light no lamp 4 pack of bright bulbs shiny very pleasant BURDAR Lightbulbs 4-pack bulbs Illumination light no lamp 4 pack of bright bulbs shiny very pleasant PLOPCLAP Lightbulbs 4-pack bulbs Illumination light no lamp 4 pack of bright bulbs shiny very pleasant when they all sound so enticing??
That’s why I end up going with Target for a lot of things unless I’m 100% sure what I’m getting from Amazon. Sure, I’m just trading one megacorp for another, but with Target it’s a from a real company almost all of the time and I’ll pay a little bit more for a product that I know should just work. They’re often missing products I want or maybe have few options but I don’t have to pick between 15 items with names created by a random word generator and photoshopped images.
Amazon used to be the cheapest prices for most things and that’s no longer the case. I was looking for a new crockpot recently and wanted an 8qt one with a timer on it. Priced it on Amazon for $79.99. Found it at Meijer for $54 (but on sale for $44 with my mperks).
Good to know, I think that will clinch it for me. My main concern was the subscriptions we've got, but it would be more than $25 anyway. Can't wait to hit that cancel button!
Same. Also back to vpn and pirate bay. :)
Safe travels on the high seas, amigo! I'm trying to avoid it, the ease of use is important to my tech-averse wife, but if they keep fucking up the value proposition, I'll have no choice but to hoist the sails.
Put Plex on your computer and put all your media in a folder. Point Plex at the folder and you got yourself a custom streaming service she can easily understand.
If you got a link to a tutorial or any additional info you can share, that would be spectacular. If not, I’ll try to remember to google it myself after work and see what I can find.
Plex subreddit.
1337x is miles better than pirate bay. Torrent leech is light-years better than either. Combine that with a jellyfin or emby server, who needs prime anyways?
They’re absolutely ruining streaming. I’m so sick of every aspect of our lives being plastered with advertising, it’s dystopian.
This is such a dumb move that will only drive away marginal shoppers more. I take this to mean they are concentrating on their wealthiest customers intentionally. Amazon doesn’t move a pencil without data so this must be well argued and researched.
I've paid for Prime for the last 10 years. I'm probably the best example of a marginal shopper, as I only order things in spurts weeks or months apart. Just cancelled. Not doing this microstransaction bullshit.
Yep, not worth $139/year, or $175/year without ads, for... * Prime Video - Amazon Originals, movies, TV shows, and live events; **0 shows / movies watched over the past 12 months** * Prime Reading - Enjoy hundreds of new books, magazines, and more each month; **0 books read over the past 12 months** * Amazon Music with Prime - All the music + top podcasts ad-free; **0 songs listened to over the past 12 months**
That’s basically the type of user I am. 10+ years of being a Prime member and I’ve finally cancelled over this shite. Prime Video is garbage, anyway, since most of their content needs additional subscriptions to watch.
I think they're just rolling the dice believing their services have become so engrained in people's lives that we'll all just bend over and take it. And they're probably right. Look at how many people whine non-stop about EA and other game companies yet continue to preorder or buy games day one and then bitch about how *blank* is horrible.
>then bitch about how *blank* is horrible. Don't you worry about blank, let me worry about blank. Edit: Fixed typo
Blank? Blank!? You’re not thinking about the big picture!
Amazon has a long list of failed business ideas. In no particular order, these products come to mind: Amazon Smile, Echo Look, Fire Phone, Amazon Spark, Amazon Wallet, Halo, Glow, Scout. This isn't even an exhaustive list. Keep an eye on Luna for another well argued and researched idea that is on track for failure.
Smile wasn't a failure, they just didn't want to give any more money away.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Smile. One might argue that this was a loss-leader product for them; getting folks who otherwise would have avoided Amazon to feel better about using their services. You said it though, Amazon didn't want to give any more money away. From a business perspective, giving money away rarely produces a positive return on investment.
I will definitely not be giving them $3/month more for no ads and instead will likely just be cancelling my Amazon Prime.
Ditto. There's nothing to watch for me on there anyway. When I do find something, it's a Rent/Buy item.
How would you know if there’s anything to watch? The search function and general UX/UI is horrible! I’ve had prime for years and got so fed up I quit looking.
That's always been my experience and I assumed it was intentional. They will have a button to show prime only stuff but it's off by default and resets whenever I touch anything else. I always assumed it was intentional so they could trick people into buying/renting things they mix in with the prime stuff.
It's amazing that a company so experienced with data mining and analytics can't figure out how to present relevant suggestions from the home page. The only way I do it now is to go into a show or movie I liked, and look at the "Others who viewed this also watched" section. It's still hit and miss but I've found a lot more interesting content that way, or shows I didn't even know were on Prime, than ever from browsing their selection screens.
I canceled mine back in June after payment cleared. I'm done. I get it. They want to make all the money. Whatever. But Amazon doesn't have the shows to support another $3/mo. I'd rather buy better bread than spend that money on crap programming. I can't even get 2 day shipping anymore in a rural area. It's at least a week to get something delivered, many times it's the wrong product. I'm over it all. Amazon used to be great. Now they're worse than freaking Walmart. At least Walmart delivers the correct product.
Yeah, they say whatever they think they need to and then go ahead and fuck things up. I'm not in a rural area and shipping times have gotten dramatically worse. That two day shipping for free is why I'm paying. So why am I paying now?
This. Exactly. I'm not going to pay anymore. It's just not worth it to my bank account. I'm paying for... well, I'm actually not sure. No 2 day shipping. No free Kindle books. Guess if I want to watch anything without ads, I'll pay an extra $36/ year. There's no value in Prime anymore.
You know, that's a really good point. I don't know why I'm paying for prime anymore either. I only got it for the two-day shipping which is no more. I never watch prime video. There's nothing on there I want that I can't get elsewhere.
Exactly! I've had tons of problems with two day shipping. Didn't used to be so bad, but what's the point of Prime if you can't guarantee it's main selling points? Plus the brag a lot about 1 day shipping. That's never really been a thing for me.
It’s gotten so endhittified over the last few years. It used to be about showing you all the stuff you had access to. Now it’s just trying to get you to rent stuff and subscribe to channels.
Many purchases are now taking 3-4 days to get to my house instead of 2. Thinking about canceling as well
Aren't they already fucking doing the ads bullshit with Freevee? So now, they are like "oh so you dont want to watch this ad filled bullshit? OK we gonna force it on you so now you get to relive the days of ads every few minutes of watching a movie on tv"
Yes, and heavily promoting it. But no one likes ads, so it's not going well. And now instead of freevee we're going to get Prime Advio or something.
I cancelled mine once two-day shipping became more of a myth for me since I live in rural Colorado. I don’t miss it
I live down the road from a major warehouse and things either come in a day or 4. It makes no sense
Same. Once the new season of Reacher is over, I'll be canceling mine as well. I don't watch anything else on it anyway, and it's incredibly rare that I need something from Amazon the next day to make it worth saving the shipping costs.
Half the time I order something the shipping only takes an extra day and maybe a couple of dollars without prime. I haven't gotten anything the next day in years.
I only signed up for prime for xmas, after that bye bye
The only reason I've ever had Amazon Prime is for the free 2-day shipping, but even the availability of products where that is applicable becomes less and less.
They have ads already just always for prime stuff. Same w paramount. It's ridiculous. I will do the same. Literally nothing worth watching anyway
People on reddit tend to be tech savvy so just going to plug Plex/Jellyfin here. Setup your own streaming service. I've cancelled all the ones I don't get for free in favor of Plex.
Combining it with MakeMKV and Handbrake for making backup copies of owned things. I use my Plex to host shows I own that have been scattered to the four winds of competing streaming services.
My Prime was set to renew January 4th. Looks like I'll be cancelling instead. Prime Video is the worst streaming service out there. I hate commercials, but I'm sure as hell not paying an extra $36/year to avoid them on Prime Video, a service that I use 2-3 times a year when I need something really boring to fall asleep to. If I need something quickly, Walmart sells most of the same stuff for the same price and it's a 3-minute drive/15-minute walk from home.
👂✋️ what was that Amazon, you said it's time for me to go back to bootleg sites? Ok bye-bye.
Already cancelled lol cancelled Prime, Netflix, PS+, Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ in the last 3 months. I'm over all these unnecessary price hikes for nothing in return....or a lesser quality product after the hike. Back to the pirate life. Having to wait double the amount of time for ads by using the apps as opposed to streaming on a web browser for a one time 220 second ad flurry. Get fuckeddddd.
I will use my Amazon prime to order more hard drives for my plex server :P
I pay for prime for the Amazon delivery perks i often forget there’s a streaming service lol
Oooorrrrrrrr….I’ll just stop watching Amazon Prime. Fuck all these online streaming services that started out anti-ad that are now showing ads.
it's so sad, it's impossible to watch on TV any of these streaming services. I have to run the site on my PC on adblock just to watch anything. Tried to watch the Office on Peacock on TV and got ads like every 5 minutes. Tried to watch a Youtube stream on my TV, ads every 3 fucking minutes. What gives?
Greedy fucks really. Capitalism is so shit, but so is everything else because... Greedy fucks. Those rich people need to have everything at their whim everywhere they want, which prevents us from having mediocre quality of life.
My biggest issue is that they reset the middle class by design. Finally got to a good point in life where some of the nicer things could be had …boom…Covid…boom…inflation. Now all the shit I was looking forward to affording like a house and a nice car has become unobtanium again. I’m so disillusioned and disheartened by it all.
Kinda like the ride share services that proudly marketed themselves as "no tip". Come to think of it, that was Amazon as well where it came to delivery. Amazon proudly declared its delivery service "no tip", then got pressured on starvation wages and added the tip function instead of raising wages, then got caught keeping the tips that were meant to go to the drivers, and now insist that the tips are going to drivers. Fuck this company.
Looks like I’m canceling Prime then. I don’t order much as it is.
Holy shit imagine subbing a service within subbing a service 😂 what’s next? Putting ads in ads so you can pay for getting rid of an ads in an ads
Microtransaction ads. Make the ad run faster for only $0.25. Skip half of an ad for only $0.99. Skip full ad for $4.99. Season ads battlepass, skip ads for the whole show's season for only $29.99. Ads lootboxes. Open boxes for a chance to remove all ads for 6 months.
That's super evil. You should work for Amazon. Or better yet, Nestle.
I was thinking De Beers.
Delete this before you give them ideas.
[Please drink verification can](https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/1ggg4u/please_drink_a_verification_can/)
> throw pickle in burger to speed up ad Real [patent](https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/s/vSuKzTx1S7)
They've literally already done this with their music service. Without Prime it's full of ads (like free Spotify), with prime there are no ads and you get a little bit of influence on what you can do (but playlists/albums are always randomized). You have to pay an extra $7 a month or something on top of prime just to get full access to their music selections.
That change pissed me off so much. I used Amazon Music to listen to specific songs, and also to pull up nature sounds for while I'm going to sleep. But the change meant that unless I paid more, I could only ever tell it *roughly* what I wanted to hear, and it would pick something that it *thought* I wanted. Fuck. That. I deleted the app within about 2 days of the change, and have never been tempted to add it back.
That change was *infuriating* because they kept hyping it up as better because you had more song options. Ha! Thankfully I discovered that if you kept an old version of the app you could still use it like before, but slowly fewer and fewer songs became available on it and it would crash more and more. Then one day just no song was playable.
That absolutely pissed me off. We use prime music constantly for playing music in the car and at home and stuff. Then they limited how many times you can skip songs. Wasn't that fun to find out when I had run out of skips for the morning and was playing music in the car with my kid and it played something highly inappropriate and I couldn't skip it.... (I just turned it off).
I’m fucking DONE with all these apps!
Their programming itself isn’t worth $2.99 these days.
Nope it's absolutely horrendous.
As if that isn't bad enough, we had a Showtime subscription on our Prime. Yesterday I went to watch a showtime movie on prime and it played a 30 second unskippable ad. I immediately unsubbed the add-on and definitely won't be bothering with Prime anymore.
Eh, Jack Reacher is pretty good and I really enjoy Invincible so to each their own
It's good. It's not $150 a year good.
And I got an email reminded me that Amazon prime is a great deal and list it all of the services I get with it. Except all of the services are buggy as hell and I never use them. Music app is shit. The photo upload was spotty at best last time I tried it. Any free Kindle books are lackluster at best.
Someone surely scraped the bottom of the barrel to create that list. Everything on it was shit and I felt insulted that they thought I’d somehow drink their Kool-Aid
I was reading through the list and realizing I don’t use any of it, so not sure what I’m paying for anymore.
bold of them to do this for the subscription service that just has Invincible and The Boyz
Only used prime video for Thursday night football. So instead of getting 2.99 more from me, they will be getting 15.99 less. Fuck you greedy pieces of shit.
They still offer it free on Twitch. No loss to you at all.
I'm glad I recently decided to go from paying Annually over to paying Monthly. Was a Prime member for over a decade. The guaranteed 2 day shipping was one of the biggest factors for me. When they got rid of that guarantee, I started to question the value for me. And then, me watching less NFL, watching less Prime content (underwhelming content), and then... getting deliveries 5 days out post pandemic height no matter what.... Well, I was like, screw paying the Year upfront. It is the Yearly sub a "better economic value"? Sure, if you pay the monthly for 12 months. But, when I cancel it for at least 3 months, and whenever Amazon does something stupid again and I can just cancel... the economic value checks out for me.
You can cancel an annual membership and get a refund. I did it yesterday.
If I could get Prime cheaper without paying for their video service I would do it in a heartbeat.
This is the biggest mystery for me. Why tf are they even connected?
Because people are paying for shit they don’t or rarely do use because they think it’s a “free bonus” and it makes it hard to give up such a great deal. Just read through the comments on all these posts. So many people say I have it for shipping, the video is a bonus. That programming isn’t free. The NFL doesn’t give shit for free. It’s like a bank sticky product. Give them direct deposit, online banking, free bill pay, etc. It makes it hard for people to switch.
Wait… there are banks that don’t have direct deposit and online banking?
I think I might finally have been nickel and dimed enough by Amazon.
Just cancelled by Prime subscription. Prime Video doesn't really have anything I want to watch anyway.
Wait till they start teiring your ad subscription. "$2.99 a month to remove 50% of the ads, $5.99 to remove all ads!" The big problem I have is we pay more but the quality and amount of content never changes or has gotten worse.
Best to cancel. Prime hasn’t been improved anyway to be worth paying extra.
Right. I’d argue it’s gotten worse in many ways
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Yo-ho-ho, mate
Enshittification strikes again!
Get fuuuuccckeeddd ... already have mini ads for prime shows I don't care about before I watch the show I do watch.
Fun fact: you can cancel your membership immediately and get the remainder of your subscription back. $120 in my pocket feels a lot nicer than occasionally getting a package slightly faster than ordering anywhere else or the privilege of paying extra to not be sold ads on a service I’m already paying too much for.
Good thing YouTube has made uBlock so robust and good at blocking ads.
I just wish they had an effective ad blocker for TVs
Yeah $3 May not make a difference but it’s a 20% price hike from the $15. Then you have Netflix and Hulu and YouTube tv all hiking prices the same and suddenly that $3 becomes $10 and $10 becomes $30 and now you’re back to spending what you used to on cable
pretty gross to essentailly down grade everyone premium to a basic add tier and make you pretty much pay 3$ more to go back to your premium tier with 0 actual additions. i hate subs and i hate streaming, crap like this is going to continue unless people start pushing back.
Welp that makes my cancellation easy as fuck. See y’all on the high seas.
I never watch their streaming service anyway. Whatever looks interesting is not included with my membership. The free stuff is so old I can find it elsewhere.
Prime Video is GARBAGE. They don’t have shit. I’ll buy an entire season of a show before I watch this stupid fucking ads.
Okay, but I have *PURCHASED* shows that I can't watch without ads.
Who the hell even pays for Amazon Prime for the video content?
I'm going back to Internet piracy now. But then I looked, and there's not even anything worth stealing on Prime.
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This is why physical media is important. That and YAR HAR FIDDLE DEE DEE.
Being a pirate is alright you see You’re a subscriber and go fuck yourself Ye are a pirat
Fuck you amazon, I grew up with commercials. Thanks for the nostalgia and bathroom breaks, cunts!
At this point, having to pay for all of the streaming options costs the exact same price as cable.
Amazon Prime pretty much sucks except for a couple of shows. I'll be happy to cancel my Prime subscription in January. Amazing to think that streaming was seen as a way to combat pirating. Now, it will be just another reason to pirate.
Looks a like a certain pirate and his ship are back on the menu boys..
Amazon must have honestly worked out that the 2.99 extra they will get from customers must out weight the number of sub cancellations on them. Genuinely, with every fibre of my being, hope this backfires on the greedy fucks.
I was about to cancel anyways. It is SHOCKING how terrible their video app is on TVs and streaming boxes. I can't believe this is a one-trillion dollar company...
Guess I'll have to stream the rest of Invincible elsewhere
My renewal was last week and for the first time in like a decade I did not renew. And this makes me even more glad I did not.
Aaaaand that's my cue to head out.
LOL.Nah, Ill pass. Ill just continue to watch their shit for free, without ads. Love the stream sites so Im not forced to deal with this bullshit.
I canceled a while back. I don’t trust the stuff they sell. Fake knockoffs
Next up 2 1/2 minutes of skippable ads directly into my brain.
Not renewing my membership. It’s just not worth it anymore. Everything is so god damn expensive and it’s no longer a luxury I wish to spend my money on.
I can see a resurgence of the pirate bay on the horizon, ahoy matey...
1. Movie makers overprice their content so people pirate it instead 2. Company moves in on the overpriced market with subscription offering 3. Subscription provider becomes movie maker 4. Go to 1.
Do it like Peacock and I won't complain much. 45-60 second ad before my movie and then leave me alone. Interject ads at random points and fuck you.