This is such a huge downside with subscription services in general. The product itself can change right under your nose and there's nothing you can do about it but cancel. First I was paying to filter out content, now I'm paying for access? That's a totally different thing that I didn't agree to.

If you frame it in a different context it sounds ridiculous. "Actually we're getting out of the video streaming business and just mailing you postcards that we think look neat. Still charging you the same rate every month, though."

There's plenty of precedent for this. Amazon has said they'll be introducing ads on Prime Video, where everyone has already paid for the service. I've seen ads on other already-paid-for services too. The simple fact is that business people will always want more ads everywhere, no matter how much it degrades the customer experience, because extra revenue is easier to measure than customer disgust. In their personal lives they probably hate ads as much as we do, but a fatter paycheck can buy a lot of hypocrisy.

Prime Video will still have an ad free tier. Having a cheaper tier that is subsidized with ads allows for more people to be able to afford it.

This isn't like Netflix where a cheaper, inferior plan was introduced. They're taking the current ad-free service introducing ads to it.

You're going to have to pay an additional $3/mo for no ads along with your existing $15/mo (Prime), $139/yr (Prime) or $8.99 (Prime Video only) plans.

This doesn't look like subsidizing to me. To me it looks more like "pay us more because we can do whatever we want".

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/entertainment/prime-video-u...