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Amazon Prime Video—one of the last major streaming services without commercial breaks—will soon have TV advertising.
Fans of flagship series like Marvelous Mrs. Maisel or The Boys will soon see “limited advertisements” in Prime Video programming, the company announced this morning.
“We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers,” Amazon said in a statement.
Though the company didn’t give specific ad loads, the lowest benchmark for ad time on a streaming platform is around four minutes per hour. Commercials will arrive in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Canada in early 2024, with other countries later in the year.
Prime Video currently costs $14.99 per month (and is also included in the $139 yearly Prime subscription). An ad-free tier will be available for an additional $2.99 per month.
Live events and sports will continue to have ads.
Joining the ranks
Prime Video was one of the last major ad-free holdouts in the streaming world, with only Apple TV+ remaining commercial-free.
Adding an ad tier follows the moves of rivals like Netflix, Disney+ and Max as streaming services continue to search for additional revenue.
According to Amazon, advertising will help it “continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.”
The company’s content spend rocketed up 30% to $16.6 billion in 2022, which includes Thursday Night Football and original series like Rings of Power. The first season of the Lord of the Rings series cost more than $500 million, and TNF rights come in at more than $1 billion annually.
And while Amazon said it would not be making price changes to Prime in 2024, multiple other streaming services have already hiked their rates.
Last month, Disney raised its streaming prices for the second time in less than a year, and NBCUniversal’s Peacock got pricier for the first time ever in July.
