[HN Gopher] Amazon Sued over Prime Video Ads: Class-Action Suit ...
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon Sued over Prime Video Ads: Class-Action Suit Alleges
Deception
Author : speckx
Score : 132 points
Date : 2024-02-14 19:54 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (variety.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (variety.com)
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| "But last month, Amazon changed the deal. To stream movies and TV
| shows without ads, Amazon customers must now pay an additional
| $2.99 per month... This is not fair, because these subscribers
| already paid for the ad-free version; these subscribers should
| not have to pay an additional $2.99/month for something that they
| already paid for."
|
| Seems like a pretty solid case where they altered the deal in the
| midst of a one year Prime contract. I look forward to the
| eventual $.32 settlement I receive.
| johnnyo wrote:
| The article mentions the ads are expected to bring in $3
| billion annually.
|
| Even if the lawsuit is successful, I suspect it will cost
| Amazon much less than what they are projecting to make.
| diggan wrote:
| > Even if the lawsuit is successful, I suspect it will cost
| Amazon much less than what they are projecting to make.
|
| What's the point then? It appears only lawyers stand to gain
| from this, as usual.
|
| As soon as fines and legal infractions are viewed merely as
| the 'cost of doing business', enforcing regulations becomes
| futile. At that point, might as well transition to a 'free
| for all' market rather than maintain a faux judicial system.
| voakbasda wrote:
| The point is that fines and legal infractions _are_ the
| cost of doing business. The government consistently fails
| to enforce laws in a meaningful way. We are indeed in the
| midst of a free for all, where "all" here refers to
| established interests wholly capable of buying legislation
| and courts.
| alwaysrunning wrote:
| > What's the point then? It appears only lawyers stand to
| gain from this, as usual.
|
| "lawyers stand to gain from this"
| Retric wrote:
| The point is it heavily discourages this kind of mid
| subscription bait and switch.
|
| Not living in a world where bait and switch / illegal
| business practices are 10x as common is the benefit of
| class action lawsuits not the occasional random check for
| $1.37 or worse a coupon etc. Long term they could have
| rolled out adds as people resubscribe and there's no
| lawsuit, and next time they may consider doing so.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Users are also harmed by watching the ads. It would be
| reasonable to calculate the value of each viewed ad as part
| of the compensation that is sought by a class-action.
| glitchc wrote:
| It's hard to show legally that users are harmed by watching
| ads, tort law requires a clear path to harm. If some users
| purport some benefit, that would negate the harm claims.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Wouldn't one clearcut argument be that many people are
| willing to pay money specifically to not see ads?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I'm willing to pay money to buy a nice car. That doesn't
| mean a less nice car would harm me.
| JohnFen wrote:
| If you paid money for a nice car and got a less nice car,
| you suffered financial harm.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If less nice car doesn't have some of the same safety
| features like side impact air bags but are then in a
| t-bone collision where you are injured because the air
| bags were not there, then yes.
| dangus wrote:
| This is exactly what I was going to say. Prime is sold as an
| annual purchase, and they didn't structure the deal so that it
| would kick the ads in when your current term expires.
| init2null wrote:
| Best case is that they'll be forced to let us cancel with a
| partial refund. This is a worthy lawsuit for that reason.
| mikestew wrote:
| "Forced"? You can already cancel Prime, and get a pro-rated
| refund.
| silisili wrote:
| I cannot believe they didn't roll this out as some feature flag
| based on account signup/renew date, and instead just told all
| paid members they're now being downgraded(remember, it's not
| just ads, it's lower quality).
| eitally wrote:
| No matter what people think about the _products_ Google has
| built, they absolutely did handled the subscription,
| grandfathering and later deprecation of Google Play Music to
| Youtube Music, and Youtube - > Youtube Red -> Youtube
| Premium. A subscriber may have lost features, but they
| definitely did not get upcharged as part of a transition, and
| only later did Google start raising rates -- separate from
| forced functional subscription changes.
| neogodless wrote:
| Yeah - Google Stadia was actually kind of nice deal for the
| people that jumped in early.
| silisili wrote:
| Absolutely. I'm still mad about going from Play Music to
| Youtube Music, but I didn't feel cheated.
|
| I was also a Stadia subscriber, and while they probably
| legally didn't have to, they refunded every single penny I
| spent on games and hardware.
| ajdude wrote:
| It's not just Google either, every single pay subscription
| service I've ever had only altered the price for me on my
| renewal date (and I've often had year-long or higher
| subscriptions). Amazon seems to be an outlier.
| jmward01 wrote:
| Somewhere in the prime TOS we have agreed to this and likely
| much worse. I paused my subscription, not that that will mean
| anything to them. This lawsuit was inevitable and will change
| absolutely nothing no matter the outcome. The meaningful change
| we need is actual consumer advocacy and invalidating predatory
| TOS clauses. It isn't possible to live in the modern world
| without accepting the ridiculous and predatory TOS attached to
| everything and that isn't right.
| vidanay wrote:
| The lawsuits and settlement budgets were all figured in to
| their anticipated costs to make this change.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > I look forward to the eventual $.32 settlement I receive.
|
| Do you know why amount is always ridiculously low. Are these
| lawsuits primarly for the lawyers to make a buck, I dont see
| how anyone else would be motivated otherwise.
| nickff wrote:
| They have a low chance of success in court, and are a
| relatively expensive proposition for the plaintiff lawyers
| pursuing them. As such, the lawyers are happy to take a
| generous (to them) settlement before the case gets too far.
| On the opposite side, it helps the company avoid expensive
| discoveries, low-probability but possibly very expensive
| judgements, and gets rid of the need to keep investors
| informed about nuisance suits.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| That's certainly the usual case, but not always. I recall one
| Facebook class action check I got that was in the $250 range.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The way a class action lawsuit works is this:
|
| You, Big Business Co, do something that injures a bunch of
| people for a small amount. A lawyer files a lawsuit on behalf
| of a purported _class_ - i.e. "Everyone Bezos Hurt vs.
| Amazon". There's a whole thing about class certification and
| other things I don't have time to get into, but let's say the
| judge agrees that this is a class whose harms can be
| adjudicated together.
|
| At some point, if you actually have a claim, Amazon wants to
| pay money for it to go away. This is an accepted part of the
| legal system, because US courts are _adversarial_ courts[0].
| The judge is just the referee. That means that if the
| plaintiff and defendant agree to take their business
| elsewhere, the judge can 't get involved and continue to
| prosecute a dead case[1].
|
| First problem: lawyers don't work for free. In fact, pretty
| much all of them are in massive amounts of student debt until
| their 40s and 50s, because their ability to command insane
| amounts of money for their services is priced into the cost
| of their education. Normally, a lawyer either gets paid by
| their client, or the client agrees to the lawyer taking a
| percentage cut of the damage award if one were to exist.
| Problem is, there's no client yet - we're suing on behalf of
| an abstract group of people that may or may not want to be
| involved in the case.
|
| Second problem: we don't know who's a member of the class, or
| even how many people are a member of it. Settlement
| agreements typically involve cash payments of a fixed amount.
| You have to divvy that fixed amount up to an unknown number
| of people.
|
| So as a result every class action settlement works like this:
| first, the lawyer gets a cut of the settlement, then the
| class splits it up however many ways. People have to respond
| to a settlement offer in order to be included in the class.
| If more people sign up than we have money for, however, then
| the class members are diluted. Amazon's liability _does not
| increase_ just because they harmed more people than they
| thought.
|
| This is, effectively, a weird kind of double protection
| racket, in which the person shaking Amazon down for money is
| also taking money from Amazon to shake them down for less so
| the mob (us) doesn't get as much. All of it is enabled by
| fairly understandable and straightforward rules being chained
| together to arrive at a terrible result.
|
| [0] The opposite of this is _inquisitorial_ courts.
| Inquisitorial as in _NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!_
|
| [1] There are certain situations in which a judge can object
| to a settlement that is unfair to the class, but they can't
| outright demand the case be brought to trial.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Except that, from all reports online (including someone in
| these comments), Amazon will cancel your annual Prime
| subscription and refund all remaining time without any problem.
| They don't seem to be holding anyone to the contract. (And of
| course plenty of people subscribe monthly rather than annually
| as well.)
|
| So I'm not sure there's any case here at all? Since even with
| annual subscriptions, it seems you can cancel at any time and
| get a prorated refund.
|
| The fact is, online subscription services change their
| benefits/features all the time. And companies seem to handle it
| two ways: grandfather existing customers for the rest of their
| subscription period, or offer prorated refunds for people who
| want to cancel. And while the former is definitely going to
| make customers happier, I think they're both acceptable from a
| _legal_ standpoint? So I 'm not sure this lawsuit has any
| chance of succeeding at all.
| Retric wrote:
| Simply canceling mid contract isn't a perfect remedy.
| Consider, should they get to keep the interest on the money
| they are handing back to you? Obviously not.
|
| Contracts are enforceable because society is much worse off
| if they aren't. Imagine if your bank could arbitrarily cancel
| a car loan and ask for the outstanding balance back at any
| time simple because they felt like it.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Enjoy the pennies on your interest.
| cma wrote:
| Can you finance monthly payments on a new Fire TV from Amazon
| and then midway through just quit paying: but to keep it from
| being a tort in the same way, let them have you send it back
| if they want it. And they have to go through your confusing
| UI or wait on hold for 40 minutes to request you send it
| back, but you don't pay any more either way.
| blibble wrote:
| the commitment for both parties was 12 months
|
| presumably they wouldn't like it if I unilaterally decided to
| say, stop paying them 3 months into the 12 month commitment
|
| how is it acceptable the other way round?
|
| if they don't want to provide the service that was committed
| to they should refund the entire purchase amount (not just
| pro-rata)
| drtz wrote:
| Here's where I'd normally complain about how our economic system
| requires prices to increase while product quality degrades to
| ensure ever-increasing profits for shareholders.
|
| Instead, I'll complain about commercials: why can't we just have
| something that's truly paid and ad-free? Do we actually value our
| time less than advertisers do?
| johnnyo wrote:
| Because it's more profitable to have something that is paid for
| AND has ads.
|
| Same thing happened with cable TV when it first came out, it
| was advertised as ad free. Then it filled up with ads, and the
| streaming services came along promising no ads. Now the circle
| is repeating itself.
|
| Here is the NYTimes in 1981 on the topic
| https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Greed is cyclical.
| drtz wrote:
| Thanks for sharing that NYT article.
|
| > ...critics say that the use of sponsorship could make cable
| programmers more vulnerable to censorship or control by
| advertisers, particularly in light of recent efforts by
| organizations such as the Moral Majority and its offshoot,
| the Coalition for Better Television.
|
| 40+ years later I think it's pretty clear this was an
| accurate prediction.
|
| > A much-cited - and widely disputed - study by the Benton &
| Bowles advertising agency found that the public would accept
| advertising if it meant a reduction or a holding-of-the-line
| on subscription fees...
|
| This is great until a year later when YoY revenue growth is
| flat and prices are increased anyway.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > Because it's more profitable to have something that is paid
| for AND has ads.
|
| how does it work for HBO then.
| asdff wrote:
| They use an embedded marketing strategy that isn't as
| obvious that you are watching advertising.
| babypuncher wrote:
| That explains the Starbucks cup in Game of Thrones season
| 8
| burnte wrote:
| No one said paid only doesn't work, the commenter simply
| pointed out the obvious that TWO revenue streams is better
| than one.
| neogodless wrote:
| Amazon's market research suggested to them that you (might)
| value your time enough to pay an extra $3/month to avoid
| watching ads.
| johnnyo wrote:
| More specifically, the total revenue of ads + the people
| willing to pay $3/month is greater than the revenue lost when
| people cancel their service due to ads
| JadeNB wrote:
| > More specifically, the total revenue of ads + the people
| willing to pay $3/month is greater than the revenue lost
| when people cancel their service due to ads
|
| The bundling makes cancellation particularly unlikely: you
| can't (or at least I don't know how to) cancel the Prime
| Video part of the Prime package alone, so there's no way to
| show your dissatisfaction with this short of cancelling the
| entire Prime membership. Which this latest push, however
| small on its own, has been enough to get me finally to
| consider doing, but it's still tough.
| gknoy wrote:
| I'll just watch even fewer things on Prime, I guess.
| Everything about the UI and watching experience seems
| worse than Netflix, but then ... that's been worsening
| recently as well in ways I can't quantify.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I canceled my Prime a while back when AMZN's started
| quoting 5 day delivery to my location, though on the rare
| times when I do order something from AMZN it often takes
| 7 days.
|
| The thing is I live less than 3 hours from a big
| warehouse (people who live in the same ZIP code as one of
| those warehouses often get 5-day shipping) but it seems
| that the residents of Upstate New York and New England
| are frequently treated as unpeople when it comes to
| facilities and infrastructure.
| avitous wrote:
| Same here. I had an additional cable channel subscription
| through Prime, which I've now cancelled, as I don't wish
| to tolerate any advertising in my video stream, so I will
| simply stop watching any video on Prime. And as you
| pointed out, the quality of Prime video offerings has
| been in decline of late.
|
| Why won't I leave Prime (yet)? Because I have an "Amazon"
| visa credit card, with an admittedly serious 5% permanent
| discount on all purchases from Amazon (as well as
| companies they own, such as Whole Foods.) I won't stop
| purchasing products through Prime just yet; am simply
| careful to avoid anything that looks problematic, price-
| gouged, or needing aftersale support, and the discount
| lock-in is too attractive to me to ignore for now. But
| video? I can always find it elsewhere. Same goes for
| "FreeVee" because "Free with ads" isn't free.
| brewdad wrote:
| FYI, if you cancel Prime but want to keep that card, they
| will downgrade you to a blue Amazon branded card that
| still gets 3% back at Amazon. I don't know if you still
| get any discount at Whole Foods since I might only go
| there about once a year at most.
|
| So if Prime is failing you in other ways, don't feel like
| you need to keep it to keep your discount.
| neogodless wrote:
| Personally I find the shipping benefits of Prime vastly
| overrated. I just got a free trial of Prime, and they
| promised 2 day shipping... but it took 4 days. Why would
| someone pay for that? I tend to let items accumulate to
| hit the free shipping minimum and then order. Still tends
| to come in 2-4 days regardless.
| sgc wrote:
| Where I live Prime is 1-2 days on almost everything. It
| is a pretty compelling service for many people, of
| course.
| johnnyo wrote:
| Amazon shipping in my area used to be 2 days, but no
| longer.
|
| Now it's generally 4 working days, sometimes more.
|
| Almost all the services I've used Amazon for in the past
| keep getting worse. Prime shipping, video, Amazon music,
| etc
| brewdad wrote:
| I have a warehouse serving our entire metro area five
| miles from my house. Shipping takes two days _after_
| Amazon sits on my order for 2-3 days.
|
| Their drivers are also the worst. The driver that covers
| my area tends to throw packages a good 10 feet at my
| door. Needless to say, Amazon is pretty much my last
| choice option these days.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| > The driver that covers my area tends to throw packages
| a good 10 feet at my door.
|
| You don't want to know what happens in warehouses...
| drtz wrote:
| I consider myself lucky to have discovered how little
| value Prime has for shipping a few years ago when Target
| had a free Shipt promotion. I learned a couple things
| pretty quickly after I dropped Prime:
|
| 1. In most cases my Amazon orders took about the same
| amount of time to get to my house as they did with Prime:
| 3-4 days
|
| 2. Amazon has some terrible dark patterns. For example,
| on the product page you always see the lowest priced
| shipping option (usually free), but at checkout it
| defaults to paid shipping. It's really easy to
| accidentally pay an extra $5.99 for shipping, often with
| the same estimated arrival it would've had with free
| shipping.
| r00fus wrote:
| Greed. That's why. Having a wildly profitable business isn't
| enough. It has to be as profitable as the market will bear.
| Pure capitalism.
| wilg wrote:
| Absolutely, advertisers are big companies who don't really care
| how much they're spending on ads. Especially big brands, they
| have no idea how much advertising helps them, and they don't
| care about the budget that much. They'll absolutely pay more to
| put an ad in front of you than you think it's worth to remove
| it. That's the whole thing with ads.
| xhrpost wrote:
| I'm sure this has been going on for a while but I'm noticing an
| even bigger obsession with companies manifesting ad inventory
| locations everywhere possible. Biggest standout recently is
| Lyft placing large ads in their app while I'm waiting on a ride
| _that I 'm paying them for_! I too used to think something that
| was paid for directly with actual money meant no ads but not
| anymore.
| maicro wrote:
| One of my favorite examples is LCD screens on gas pumps -
| yelling at you about various deals in the store, as you're
| standing there _giving them money for the fuel you're
| pumping_. Some at least have a mute button...
| brewdad wrote:
| I will go to a gas station with those loud screens exactly
| once. After that, I have written them off. There is a
| station in my in-law's town with those. I had to fill up
| there once about 10 years ago as my fuel light was on. I'm
| 95% sure they got rid of the screens a while back but I
| will never go to that station again if I have a choice.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I've accidentally hit those sorts of gas stations a
| couple of times. I didn't even bother getting gas at
| them, though. I got back in my car and drove away. I'm
| not willing to pay a company to abuse me. There are other
| stations that actually value their customers, and I'll go
| to them.
|
| This same attitude is also why I stopped doing any
| business with Amazon years ago. They became intolerable.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| If I go to those I'll lean with my hand over the speaker if
| they don't have a mute button. I'm not listening to
| whatever garbage they put together there. I wish I could do
| more but I need gas... I hate this world sometimes.
| drtz wrote:
| I think this was just a short reprieve from ads in some
| spaces as we were adopting new tech, not a norm that is just
| recently being broken. Cable TV, newspapers, magazines, and
| even many taxis and municipal buses have had advertisements
| for decades.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Monopoly is the best position to implement anti-competitive
| behavior. Copyright is monopoly. It should be no surprise that
| Copyright has resulted in anti-competitive behavior.
|
| No one can afford to compete with large media corporations,
| because Copyright explicitly turns media corporations into
| monopolies.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Copyright's not monopoly. Do you mean the company that owns a
| TV show has a "monopoly" on that TV show? That's not what
| people mean monopoly.
| gretch wrote:
| > why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-
| free?
|
| We can. You just have to make it first.
|
| This is not a question to ask of others, it a just question you
| ask yourself. Once you answer it for yourself, then just
| realize that same answer applies to everyone from their
| perspective.
| drtz wrote:
| > We can. You just have to make it first.
|
| But how? I don't have the resources to build something like
| this on my own. I'm skeptical I could convince many investors
| to give me money to build something pitched as "just like
| Prime Video but without the ad revenue" when Amazon has
| certainly already done market research and determined this is
| the best path to maximize profit.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Exactly.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > We can. You just have to make it first.
|
| They've _been_ made. Repeatedly. They just don 't persist.
|
| Our economic system won't let them.
| joemaller1 wrote:
| Advertisers are sort of benevolent here, if not lesser victims.
|
| Google, Facebook and now Amazon realized the big money is in
| brokering ads. As brokers, they know everything and control
| everything, exploiting both the viewers and advertisers.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| The problem is that the most lucrative advertising market is to
| advertise to those people who are willing to pay extra to not
| see ads. The people who are willing to save money by seeing
| ads, are also the people who don't have excess discretionary
| cash that they'd be willing to spend on the products
| advertisers are advertising to them. This is the paradox that
| keeps driving this industry around in circles, swallowing its
| own tail.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| An excellent point. This is why we can't have good things in
| a growth-paradigm economy.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Good point. We'd have no streaming services and we'd be
| happy.
| milesvp wrote:
| There was an interesting interview with a long timer with
| google on a podcast I listen to (freakanomics?) where the
| concept of ads came up. Apparently very early on google did the
| analysis and found that google search provided something like
| $50 (can't remember the exact number) of actualizable annual
| value to a typical user. Which is to say they could charge
| around $5 monthly and it'd still be worth it for most people to
| pay. But the ads. They could make way more than $50 per user
| just during the christmas season alone. And so it was a no
| brainer for them to go with ads (despite anti ad sentiment
| being a key part of the papers that led to the creation of
| google...).
|
| So, to answer your question. I think we do value our time less
| than advertisers do. Worse, is I suspect your eyeballs becomes
| more valuable to advertisers the more your willing to pay to
| not see ads...
| dgrin91 wrote:
| I mean you can, it just costs $3/month more now. Basically any
| service out there has truly ad free versions if you pay more.
|
| It sucks that the price point keeps getting farther away, but
| it does exist.
| thinkingkong wrote:
| It doesnt take much of an imagination to understand that amazon
| knew of the probability of a lawsuit, understands the probability
| of its success, and did the math on upside. With 3B on the line
| they can afford the lawyers, the appeals, the penalties, etc.
| wrs wrote:
| What burns my cookies is that you pay the extra $3 for "ad-free"
| service and then Freevee _still has ads_. I thought Freevee was
| the way they sneaked in an ad-based service by just branding it
| differently. Are they going to add another $3 for "ad-free
| Freevee"?
| kennethrc wrote:
| ... sigh ...
|
| Considering the shows I've liked on FV, one can hope :|
| brewdad wrote:
| The ads have always been Freevee's business model. So they
| might offer an ad-free option at some point but that seems
| highly unlikely.
| srameshc wrote:
| Will that even bother Amazon ? I am sure all the big ones have
| learned how to settle these Suits.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I'd rather have them be forced to let me cancel Prime Video and
| discount my Prime membership by $8.99/month. If they are going to
| make Prime Video unusable to me by injecting ads, then I don't
| want to pay for it at all, but I do still want the other Prime
| benefits.
| maxwell wrote:
| Seems like whole premise of Prime, and most Apple products for
| that matter, is to capitalize on the failure to enforce product
| tying that's illegal under both Sherman and Clayton.
| blagie wrote:
| ... I thought the original premise of Prime was to take goods
| and services which, under basic economic theory, are more
| efficient centrally-funded by taxes, and provide those via a
| private entity. Especially things with zero marginal cost,
| like movies, music, and TV, should not be sold per-unit, but
| should be available to everyone and funded by taxes. Prime
| looked like a private equivalent to that.
|
| If we all pay $3.5B per month (350M people times $10/month),
| that's enough to give us all the college textbooks, movies,
| software, and music we might want to use, as well as paying
| for a lot of transportation infrastructure for rapid
| shipping.
|
| It seemed like a good model while Amazon was doing that.
|
| Now it looks more like what you said.
|
| Prime looks a lot more antitrusty in the model it's evolving
| to. I cancelled Prime about six months back, and Amazon is
| just obnoxious. There are ads on content I paid for. I can't
| check out without five annoying alerts. All those Prime deals
| look a lot less like deals and more like ways to bump up
| pricing for people who don't opt in. All in all, once I
| cancelled Amazon, it basically imploded on me, and now I only
| use it if there are seriously no other options.
|
| That also pushes me away from any vendors who standardized on
| Amazon for logistics. All of a sudden, I realized non-Prime
| members just won't buy from you if you use Amazon for
| logistics.
|
| It didn't used to be like that. Pre-Prime Amazon worked fine.
| liendolucas wrote:
| So this is the cherry on top. After paying for a subscription you
| also have to pay to not get ads? That's lame. People should start
| boycotting Amazon right now.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| Remember, AMZN is all about "customer delight"
| crazygringo wrote:
| Genuine legal question here: can this suit succeed as long as
| Amazon allows anyone to cancel their Prime membership with a
| refund of all remaining time?
|
| You can subscribe to Prime monthly or yearly. Anecdotally,
| everywhere I've checked on forums, everyone who's contacted
| customer service to cancel their annual Prime membership has
| gotten a prorated refund (or even full refund in some cases). And
| I'm assuming that's probably their actual internal policy,
| specifically to avoid a lawsuit.
|
| So if this is the case, is there any basis for this suit to
| succeed? It seems like it's wrong if Amazon changes the terms
| mid-subscription -- but it doesn't seem necessarily wrong for
| ongoing subscriptions _if_ you can get out of it at any time.
| notatoad wrote:
| >And I'm assuming that's probably their actual internal policy,
| specifically to avoid a lawsuit.
|
| it might be to avoid a lawsuit, but it's probably not to avoid
| this specific lawsuit. when i cancelled my prime, i didn't have
| to give any reason why, i never told anybody it was because i
| was mad about getting ads on prime video. but i still got the
| pro-rated refund for the 6mo remaining in the subscription.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39350257
| oraphalous wrote:
| I would dismiss such lawsuits and their plaintiffs as strange and
| persnickety if it weren't for...
|
| Here in Australia, where the ads haven't been introduced yet, I
| got a notification from Amazon prompting to change to a yearly
| subscription because of the money I'd save. They've never
| prompted me thusly before.
|
| I don't care about the extra dollars for ad free. It's just like
| raising the price of a service - which happens all the time. And
| what's more, it certainly WOULD benefit me to switch to yearly,
| which I never got around to doing.
|
| But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Amazon is trying to
| lock people into year long contracts right before they change the
| terms. The deliberateness of THAT intent, the willingness to just
| so blatantly pinch from the pocket of the unwary - even if it's
| only a few bucks. That PISSES ME OFF.
|
| Now I love capitalism - the right to own the sweat off your brow
| that stokes the competitive fires! It's the air we breathe. But
| these hyper-capitalist a-holes that would steal a cent if you
| just blink for a second... Goddamn. What makes these people?
|
| That drop of sweat, that they didn't earn, joins the billions of
| others in a torrent of wealth being syphoned of the regular folk
| on a daily basis. And the world is growing parched.
|
| So I salute the persnickety and fastidious Sir Wilbert Napoleon
| and everything he represent. I hope he wins.
| adamjc wrote:
| This, Netflix account-sharing blocking, and the ever increasing
| amount of streaming platforms (that mean an overall reduced
| catalogue per platform) leads me to believe we will see a
| resurgence in piracy.
|
| Yo, Ho, Ho :)
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| "Went back" to piracy years ago... I actually pirated movies
| even when they were available on my Netflix subscription. I
| unsubscribed from Netflix when they started their descent into
| Netflix-only content.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Watching Ads on Amazon Prime Video Is a Deal Breaker for Some_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39178546
| zerocrates wrote:
| I wonder what made Amazon go with this course of action.
|
| Plenty of the other providers have done _basically_ the same
| thing: the previous price now includes ads and you have to pay
| more to stay ad-free... but they 've all done it by raising
| prices and introducing a lower with-ads tier.
|
| To me it feels worse to have your service downgraded with the
| option to pay more to get it back than it does to have your price
| increased with the option to drop to a worse tier. That's sort of
| irrational, as the price increase is basically "opting you in" to
| pay more, but also just reflects how much ads suck.
|
| In terms of Amazon's choice, my best guess is that it's a
| reaction to an effect I've seen other providers describe: the ads
| are so lucrative they actually earn more on the lower-tier
| customers.
| rc-1140 wrote:
| The most important question, in my opinion, is will this class-
| action suit actually result in any meaningful change or will
| Bezos/Amazon scrape up some cash to make this "little lawsuit
| problem" go away?
| malermeister wrote:
| Get a seedbox for like 10 bucks a month, throw on Jellyfin,
| Radarr and Sonarr and never worry about this BS ever again.
|
| I used to pay for Netflix and Prime. It keeps getting more
| fragmented, more expensive and more shittified.
|
| Like Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. I'm willing
| to pay a reasonable monthly fee for a good service. Unfortunately
| the only ones providing that are pirates.
| hasbot wrote:
| More info for those (like me) that didn't know what a seedbox
| is:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/seedboxes/wiki/index/what_is_a_seed...
| rdudek wrote:
| What's worse is they locked Dolby Atmos and HDR behind the paid
| tier, something that used to be available normally. The
| Enshitification of Amazon continues.
| spandrew wrote:
| I cancelled my Amazon Prime after this email. $2.99 isn't a lot,
| but I was already on the fence given all of their good shows were
| heading to the dumpster fire that is the + premium channels;
| Paramount+ AMC+ channels, etc.
|
| So far I haven't missed it. I watch more YouTube than any of
| these services anymore.
| sakopov wrote:
| I guess next quarter is going to be a blowout. Amazon is pulling
| all kinds of levers in the name of profitability. AWS is now
| charging for [public IPV4
| usage](https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/02/aws-ipv4-charges/)
| which will bring $1B in revenue.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-02-14 23:00 UTC)