4 ads in 1 hour… Amazon ruins season 2 of Rings of Power: This is high treason!

News culture 4 ads in 1 hour… Amazon ruins season 2 of Rings of Power: This is high treason!

1.99 dollars/month to delete them all

Before I rush to Prime Video with my mouth drooling to pour out my bile, I want to highlight an important point. Amazon offers (by far) one of the cheapest SVOD services on the market. For $6.99/month (or $69.90/year or 2 months free), subscribers can benefit from a regularly updated catalog of films, series and anime. However, viewing conditions have changed drastically since April 9. The North American company had expressed its desire to introduce advertising breaks and this has been happening for several months. There is still an alternative to get rid of those advertisements that prevent you from fully immersing yourself in a work or a universe.

“No crazy wasp!” Of course, this service is subject to payment. For an additional charge of $1.99/month on top of the subscription price, viewers can enjoy an optimal experience… provided they put a little more into their pockets each month. The streaming platform Prime Video, which was previously attractive due to its extremely competitive pricing, is now linked to Netflix and Disney+. The two competitors offer subscriptions with advertising for $5.99/month, which give access to catalogues with much more original programs. Nevertheless, Amazon, as an SVOD service, offers excellent value for money through its annual subscription. The fact is that outdated advertising simply ruins the broadcast of the works.

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Amazon Prime Video, the master of advertising

I understand the need for a company to make money in order to survive. In the case of Amazon – an international online sales giant – survival is not the main concern. We are not talking about a small SME, but an American company that is making multi-billionaires every year. It’s simply about making money and making even the smallest part of your business portfolio profitable. SVOD costs an arm and a leg, even just in servers, and the democratization of 4K only drastically increases operating costs. Prime Video has logically extended the sacrosanct advertising to earn a few more dollars per subscriber.

And to ensure that the audience ultimately succumbs to this new “ad-free” offer, The SVOD service abuses advertising breaks to the point of distorting the broadcast programs. Episode 6 of the second season of Rings of Power really traumatized me and proves to be a perfect example of an increasingly worrying trend. There are no less than 4 commercials, including the one before the viewing, with a total duration of 3 minutes, linked within an hour. 1 minute of advertising for 20 minutes of series. We are dangerously approaching the YouTube ratio (I exaggerate a little), a ratio that made me leave the platform in 2024, despite paying for a Prime Video subscription.

In the episode in question, Tom Bombadil says the following words to the stranger: “Your friends or your fate. The choice is yours.” I see a hidden message there. “Your subscribers or your bottom line…” Prime Video has made a decision and is 100% committed to it and is ruining the Lord of the Rings series. In my eyes, it is undermined by commercials that praise everything and its opposite and I couldn’t care less. Paying to watch ads… we live in 2024 in an advertising dystopia that horrifies me and makes me fear the worst. We have become “disposable brain time,” nothing more.

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