Amazon to run ads on Prime Video shows as streaming services continue to devolve

This deal, as Lando Calrissian famously said, is getting worse all the time.

Amazon has announced plans to begin rolling out ads for Prime Video shows and movies in 2024. The company said it plans to have “meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers,” reports Deadline.

Like every major streaming service that has introduced ads (which is most of them at this point), Prime Video will offer an ad-free tier for an extra $2.99/month in the United States. This would be in addition to the $14.99/month for customers paying for Amazon Prime, or $8.99/month for those that only subscribe to Prime Video — the ad-supported tier is not coming at a discount.

For those interested in seeing what ads are currently like on Amazon, check out Thursday Night Football, which Amazon has had the exclusive rights to since 2022. It’s just like a regular football game, with one weird quirk: Amazon doesn’t allow beer commercials.

Amazon claims that the ads in its nonsports content “will allow the company to continue investing in content and increasing that investment over time,” which is kind of a bananas thing for a company that reported $514 billion in revenue last year to say.

Rings of Power don’t come cheap, I guess.