Will Amazon Prime Video Ads Be Introduced in India in 2021?
(Reuters) – Amazon Prime Video will join its streaming rivals next year in rolling out ads and introducing a more expensive ad-free tier as the industry grapples with a post-pandemic slowdown in subscriber numbers.
The US tech giant said on Friday that the ads will roll out in the US, UK, Germany and Canada in early 2024, followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico and Australia later this year.
Amazon’s ad-free tier costs another $2.99 a month in the US, where a Prime subscription currently costs $14.99 a month or $139 a year. Prices for other countries will be shared later, the company said.
Netflix and Walt Disney have also introduced similar measures, hoping that a rise in advertising revenue would offset the slowdown in subscriber additions.
However, the growth of advertising-supported plans has been slow. To increase tier subscriptions, Netflix has dropped its commercial subscriptions in the US and UK, while Disney has increased the prices of its ad-free tiers.
Amazon already runs ads on live event content like the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, a practice that continues even if a subscriber has paid for an ad-free plan, the company said.
The company said it plans to show fewer ads than traditional TV and other streaming providers, adding that it would not raise prices in 2024 for its current Prime membership plan.
The e-commerce company does not disclose Prime membership numbers. But Insider Intelligence estimates that Amazon Prime is the third largest video streaming platform in the US with 157.3 million subscribers, behind YouTube and Netflix.
After two disappointing earnings reports, Amazon reported better-than-expected quarterly sales growth and profit in August, driven by improvement in both of its key growth engines, e-commerce and cloud services.
