If you signed up to Amazon Prime video services and expected no advertising, the bad news is the Amazon owned Company, who are losing billions is about to start dishing up ads with no announcement yet as to when their new service will impact subscribers locally.
Amazon claim that they plan to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows, streamed from its Prime Video service on January 29th, however at this stage it’s not known if this is the date that Australian subscribers will face having to watch advertising a move that is set to also impact free to air TV stations and Foxtel who one of the few profitable streaming Companies operating in Australia with the business set to roll out their new Hubbl service early in the new year.
The Company is expected to use CES 2024 to showcase what packages are available with Samsung LG and the likes of Amazon, moving to strip revenue away from TV stations such as Seven West, Paramount owned Ten and Nine Entertainment as well as ABC and SBS streaming services.
“This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,” the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to “limited advertisements.”
“We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers.
Prime Video costs $9.99 a month in Australia, you can save if you sign up for a year for $79.
The move comes as competing streaming services continue to raise subscription rates across the board and push ads upon customers on their cheapest monthly plans.
Streaming services such as Paramount +, Amazon Prime and Disney+ are desperate to stem losses from streaming and pay down billions in debt.
Media companies including Warner Bros and Discovery are raising prices while Warner is looking at a possible merging with Paramount +.
That’s in part because they’ve been focused almost exclusively on their content libraries.
Instead, they must rethink what consumers need in the streaming era claim observers.
In Australia Foxtel is profitable with some observers claiming that a merger between Binge the Foxtel Group owned streaming service and the Nine Entertainment owned Stan would “make sense in the current environment”.
Foreign owned streaming Companies that stormed into the Australian entertainment market, now face a host of serious issues in in 2024 after losing more than $5bn in the past year from the streaming services they built to compete with Netflix.
Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast, and Paramount — US entertainment conglomerates that have been growing ever larger for decades — are facing pressure to shrink or sell legacy businesses, scale back production and slash costs following billions in losses from their digital platforms.
Shari Redstone, Paramount’s billionaire controlling shareholder, has effectively put the company on the block in recent weeks.
She has held talks about selling the Hollywood studio to Skydance, the production company behind Top Gun: Maverick, people familiar with the matter say.
Wall Street’s response to the news that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav had also explored a potential deal for Paramount Global in a meeting with its CEO Bob Bakish and chair Shari Redstone, who controls the firm through family holding company National Amusements was to mark down the value of the stock.
Shares of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) dropped as investors tried to take in the impact that a merger of this scale would have on the market.
As for Amazon Prime the subscription cost is tipped to stay the same with a possible price rise in the future despite the introduction of advertising.
