Amazon Prime Video content to start including ads next year

Amazon has become garbage anyway, I buy stuff at retail stores now. What all this really means is that the "disruption" from free money is over and new economy businesses are resorting to the same legacy business crap in order to try and make money.

I used to be a huge fan of vertical integration, but like it less and less as I get older. What I've seen with vertical integration is that if one part of the company blows up, then all the other parts go away too. Meanwhile, a good standard lasts forever. I have used seemingly millions of proprietary chat apps over the years, but the one that has kept working for decades is plain old email. It always works. The PSTN is also great. I can call anyone in the world, no matter what service provider I have or what service provider they have. You just type the numbers and it works. Sure, there's spam. I think I can deal with the spam better than "sorry, we need to cut costs this quarter so X is gone".

Something else I was thinking about is the advantage for the company itself. Imagine you're a software engineer on AWS, but really want to work on Twitch. Easy, it's just an internal transfer! You show up at a new desk tomorrow with the same compensation and benefits as you had before. But if they were separate companies, you'd interview with Twitch, they'd call back and say "we loved you, when can you start" and then you get the chance to negotiate a higher salary. With internal transfers, you get "that's impossible, there is nothing we can do if you want more". Good for the shareholders, bad for software engineers.

While I understand why it needs to be stated, it was such a funny line in the middle of this announcement.

This is also one of these cases where it goes out in US and some select western countries first, and they will shape the evolution of the product before it hits the rest of the world.

I'm pretty much hoping there's a big uproar in the first countries, because otherwise it's enough of a pain that I'd be out of Prime for good (video is the only part barely justifying the price for me now).

PS: This feels like the same shakedown as Youtube prime: we're paying to not getting bullied, and there's no frame of reference on how much it should be priced as they're not selling a product, but a protection.

At most BlubCo-type companies these days, an internal transfer often involves all the fun of the interview loop, while getting to skip all the hassle of negotiating a higher salary.