What Does Amazon Prime’s New Plan For Commercials Mean For Your Subscription?

Following in the footsteps of pretty much every streaming platform at this point, Amazon has announced that its Prime Video catalog will have ads starting next year. However, the retail giant promises that it will have fewer commercials than its competitors.

The good news is that the change won’t go into effect until early 2024, which means The Boys spinoff Gen V and Invincible Season 2 will be unscathed when they arrive this Fall. The bad news is both highly-anticipated series will have ads once the change goes into effect, and even if you’re an annual Amazon Prime subscriber, you will have to pay extra for the ad-free option.

Here are the official details via Amazon:

To continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time, starting in early 2024, Prime Video shows and movies will include limited advertisements. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. Ads in Prime Video content will be introduced in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Canada in early 2024, followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia later in the year. No action is required for Prime members. We’re not making changes in 2024 to the current price of Prime membership. We will also offer a new ad-free option for an additional $2.99 per month* for U.S. Prime members and will share pricing for other countries at a later date.

That is some clever wording. While Amazon technically isn’t raising the price for Prime, you will have to pay $2.99 extra, per month, if you don’t want ads in your movies and shows.

In that case, surprise, you just got hit with a price raise.