Yeah, I'm currently paying monthly for Amazon Prime, and every time I think of canceling, I decide that I'm still using Prime Video as my only streaming service.
I experimentally tried the Prime Video "free with ads" content, and there's no way I'm going to tolerate that, much less pay for it.
Oh, besides Amazon's "free with ads" ruining the content experience, and also being a little creepy and making me feel dumber, they recently pulled a whopper of a faux pas: every Prime Video ads break included a commercial for HIV medication. Assuming that ads are somewhat personalized, as many other ads seemed to be, this was startling. I don't have HIV, my doctor would've told me, I'm not at elevated risk, I haven't browsed about it, I haven't searched Amazon for anything I know to correlate, haven't knowingly shared my WiFi, what is Amazon smoking this time, etc. All thoughts I went through. Was I watching a show before that? For entertainment and relaxation?
Just now, I remembered the phrase "Netflix and Chill", and imagined someone getting this barrage of presumably targeted HIV video commercials on their personal Amazon account, on an evening that they had a special someone over. Would that someone persevere until the fourth time the video was interrupted for an extended discussion of HIV medication, before they said, "I'm gonna go now"?
The first of the Amazon Leadership Principles:
> Customer Obsession -- Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
I don't see how anything about the FreeVee "free with ads" is consistent with the customer's trust. I suspect this and some other recent changes are more like people frittering away others' past long-term investments, in an attempt at short-term returns.