According to a new report out of The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is looking to launch a new tier of Prime Video that will be ad-supported. This seems to be the new big thing for streaming services these days, with Netflix having added an ads tier and now Amazon looking to follow suit.
This isn’t a huge surprise, as Amazon has recently been hiring executives for ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) as well as free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) positions, as long ago as last fall.
With Amazon Prime Video already costing $8.99 per month, or as part of the $14.99/month Prime membership, it’s already one of the cheaper streaming services out there. However, with Amazon spending a ton of money on sports – like Thursday Night Football – it wouldn’t be to surprising to see prices going up soon.
The report does note that the streamer is in the “early stages” of development. So we might not get a price for this tier for quite a bit.
Prime Video does have roughly 74M subscribers in North America
While Amazon doesn’t actually report the number of Prime members it has anymore, estimates point to Prime Video having around 73.39 million subscribers in the US and Canada. Which isn’t too bad, and actually puts it above some other streamers like SHOWTIME and STARZ. But keep in mind that not every Prime member uses Prime Video – like myself – so these numbers are still skewed a bit.
Is adding ads to Prime Video a bad thing? Nope. While we used to hate seeing ads on platforms that we pay for, it’s started to become the norm. So if we can get it for less, with seeing some ads, most of us probably won’t care too much. However, if Amazon does add some FAST channels, that could really boost its user-base.