Key Takeaways
- Amazon introduces new ad styles coming to Prime Video to increase interactivity.
- Streaming services are adopting the cable TV ad-supported model they destroyed.
- Ad-supported plans are on the rise, making companies more profit than ad-free options.
Cable TV is dead! Long live cable TV.
Streaming services have “disrupted” the cable TV model for years, only for them to come around and finally accept it. Cable TV, which boasted commercials and saw a direct correlation between a show’s success and revenue, is the model streaming companies are embracing. This, of course, takes the place of the plan to make a bunch of content and hope that somehow they make money — something made all the more apparent by recent news that Amazon, having already recently introduced an ad-supported subscription tier, will integrate more ads.
Amazon introduces new ad styles to Prime
Get ready to watch and shop
Amazon recently announced three new styles of ads that viewers can expect on Prime Video. It includes “shoppable carousels,” which sounds a lot like, instead of scrolling through titles of shows and movies you want to watch, scrolling through ads for brands you don’t want to deal with. There will also be “interactive pause ads,” so that when you take a break from watching a show that mocks capitalism and warns of its dangers, like Fallout, you can embrace it right from your TV.
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The last new ad style, which is maybe also the most absurd, is something Amazon is calling “interactive brand trivia ads.” This initiative, which feels like it was made up by Tom Wambgans and Cousin Greg right out of Succession, will allow advertisers to “elevate their storytelling by entertaining customers with factoids about their brand while giving them the opportunity to shop on Amazon.” This reportedly will include so-called ‘rewards’ for viewers, allowing you to far more easily add items to your Amazon shopping cart.
Roku is preparing to show video ads on its homescreen interface
It’ll be joining the likes of Amazon and Google.
Just imagine the Inception-level advertisements that will break brains. You’ll be watching a show on Amazon Prime, then pause and be presented with a range of Amazon entertainment products, some of which you may be using at that exact moment. You can click on them and then start shopping away, forgetting about the mediocre piece of content you were watching, eventually finding a page on Amazon that will advertise to you the Prime Video platform, which will remind you that you were once watching something, completing this depressive circle.
I don’t want to give out any ideas for free to make things worse, but it’s not hard to imagine where this is going next. How about getting an alert on your phone when you’re watching something on Prime with product placement? I can see it now: Nicole Kidman comes on screen in season 2 of Nine Perfect Strangers, and Amazon sends you an alert that you can buy the chic hat she’s wearing; and if you buy now, you’ll get a discount and three months from some other service that’s full of ads.
Ad-support tiers are all around
Turns out, commercials make money
Amazon, along with Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, and Paramount+ offer ad-supported plans, many of which have been around for a while. What’s alarming though, is Amazon’s aggressive push, with this announcement coming just a couple months since it introduced ads on Prime Video, which allows users to opt out of ads by paying an addition $3 per month.
What’s concerning isn’t just that these “cheaper,” ad-supported plans are on the rise, but that companies prefer that you sign up for them than paying more for ad-free plans. That’s because they’re not really cheaper; you pay less up front, but the services and associated advertisers make more profit off them because you’ll end up spending more time tempted by products. This is evident byNetflix earlier this year axing its cheapest ad-free plan. It really wants you to think long and hard about whether paying more money for fewer ads is worth it. It almost certainly is, but that also means that if too many people opt out of ad-supported subscriptions, Netflix, Amazon and others are likely to raise the prices on those options.
Living with advertisements
Balance is needed
There are no escaping advertisements, and I understand I need to live with some, but at least with cable TV you know when they are coming. There were proper act breaks, and you know you have two-and-a-half minutes to run off. Sure, Amazon gives a countdown clock, so you know when the ad runs out, but I can tell you from experience it sure doesn’t know the best place to put them in, mainly because the shows and movies I’ve been watching aren’t made with commercial breaks in mind.
I personally expect this trend to continue. It’s clear in this industry that if something looks like it’s working for one company, others will follow suit (which is how this mess was created in the first place, everyone trying to copy Netflix) meaning you can expect to see a lot more of them popping up.
Additionally, it looks like Roku wants to send ads to your phone, and Walmart seems like it wants to buy out a TV manufacturer so it can promote its own products.
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The tech-minded leaders finally realized the successful, decades-long model of cable TV that made a lot of people a lot money and was generally accepted by a viewing population may have had one or two things right. After years of churning out tons of mediocre or mediocre-adjacent content, with a few good hits here and there, streaming platforms are scrambling to stop bleeding money, and viewers like you and me are going to pay the price, literally and figuratively.
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