Dropped my prime subscription when they added the first lot of ads. I don’t buy enough stuff to make the free shipping worth it on its own, and was mostly there for video anyway, so having ads immediately killed the value proposition for me.

Same here - ads in their "prime" (more like sub-prime now) video service were what made us cancel as well.

Honestly, it's been fine. It turns out a lot of other retailers have almost caught up to Amazon with choice and some even shipping speed.

I never thought I’d be saying this, but I order from Walmart+ whenever I can - it’s often cheaper than Amazon and often has same day delivery.

The other places I check are Best Buy for anything new and Newegg. They often are equal to or beat Amazon’s pricing, and returns with Best Buy are easy.

Walmart+ has a Paramount+ subscription I’ve logged into exactly once - to claim some $10 new signup deal.

+1 to Best Buy. Saved $20 on a $100 item. Prefer ebay for buying parts for projects/repairs

I don't have walmart+ but walmart has the same $35 free shipping thing as amazon. And I usually get walmart stuff much faster than Amazon, unless there's a third party seller involved.

NewEgg was terrible to deal with back in 2020 when their third-party sellers misbehaved. I haven't gone back yet. Maybe things have improved.

The ads on Prime Video are the worst. At first they seem like your typical TV ads, but they have that uncanny valley / gen AI vibe that gives me a weird icky feeling. They have ads for movies on Prime, which are composed of totally random clips from the movie that make absolutely zero sense when mashed together. Then they have ads for random Amazon garbage products like phone holders, which try to look like grassroots YouTube videos. Honestly makes it hard to watch. Prime Video feels like a committee-driven ad agency masquerading as a TV studio.

Imho, the ads on Amazon Music are far worse. Songs I paid dollars for, every fking one of them, and they interrupt them with ads. I am done with that company.

I have prime for actually buying stuff, but I never use the video/music there, particularly since they've started shoveling ads at you now, I've even less incentive to use it.

I still download anything I want to watch from the usual places using radarr, sonarr, etc, playback on everything on kodi anywhere (even in VR bigscreen), and look ma, no commercials. Ever.

I cannot abide commercials ever since max headroom blipverts as a kid in the 80's got me thinking about what commercials really were. You shouldn't either. Defund the media cartels and say no to commercials.

My sister doesn't see ads on Prime Video, but I do. My theory is that I order more stuff from Amazon than she does, so get enough value from the free shipping aspect that I'm not likely to cancel my Prime subscription, even though I've stopped watching Prime Video since the ads started. TV is just not good enough for me to watch ads, ever. I'll dust the furniture over watching ads!

All of these services reverting to ads just makes me feel like we’ve gotten such a bullshit corpo rug pull compared to cable. Cable was nice and bundled and it was like a pipe of shows. It was super convenient with a unified interface. But we switched to streaming because in every other way it was better. Especially that there were no commercials. It makes me really angry when I start talking about it because it just feels like a betrayal of the benefits of these services. It felt like the consumer had won, like a battle had been fought that we’d gotten past marketing and advertising controlling media. But it’s just more of the same. Amazon and these other streaming services just can’t cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. The temptation of money is simply too tempting.

At this point I’m never giving up my PLEX server, especially for my children’s sake. Primarily because I control exactly what they get to see (mostly shows from when I was growing up). Also a funny side effect is they get really confused when they see advertisements.

Have you tried Pluto.tv? It's old fashioned cable television via the internet with commercials and a guide. Completely free. No sign up required.

FWIW the ad free costs 2EUR / month in Europe, which is very cheap compared to any other subscription.

Do you mean Prime with Ad free video is only 2EUR/Month, or it is 2 MORE Euro's /Month?

The latter. Plus 2 EUR/month for ad-free video. On top of 50 to 90 EUR/year for Amazon Prime.

If we consider it as a sneaky way to increase prices, it's less steep than YouTube Premium price hike. At least you can ignore Prime Video an get all the other benefits for the same price as before.

I can't find a way to strip these out, so I am considering another approach. Is there an alternative frontend for consuming Prime Video?

If not, how hard would it be to interact with the hdmi stream and implement an auto-mute feature? I've been considering ways to remove these annoyances and since they don't provide a convenient way for smart people they're justifying the effort to a more complicated approach.

These companies need to leave some low-hanging fruit or they're going to be incentivizing a whole host of developers who are more motivated to solve this problem than anyone they could possibly hire internally.

Finally. These ads are actually really effective at breaking my procrastination cycles and getting me away from the screen for a while.

My prime membership lapsed recently and when I really thought about it I didn't see a need to renew it. Even with the video portion, it does not have the same value anymore. Not when I can get the same products from other retailers with free shipping automatically thrown in.