Every year, Amazon dings Prime members for $139, and now, starting sometime next year, these greedy trillionaires are about to add commercials to their already lousy streaming service.
The only reason I’m an Amazon Prime subscriber is for the free — uhm, I mean, “free” — shipping. My plan is to cancel after I own every Blu-ray ever made. As far as Amazon’s streaming service, I can’t remember the last time I watched anything in that junk pile. The only entertainment I get from Amazon’s streaming service is looking at the menu and wondering why a consequential Internet company that changed how America purchases pretty much everything can’t create a better menu. You know, there might be something in there I want to watch, but the menu is so cluttered and confusing you can’t find anything.
There is one way to avoid ads. All you need do is pay the trillionaires at Amazon even more money: $2.99 per month.
Will you look at that — a subscription fee on top of another subscription fee. Now, you’re paying close to $170 a year for Amazon Prime.
And now I’m going to tell you what’s really happening…
Prime Video will now join rival streaming services, including Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max and Disney’s Hulu and Disney+, that are leaning on advertising. The ad-supported options are not only giving consumers a cheaper option as the list of streaming apps grows, but are also bringing in an additional revenue source.
Media companies in particular have been trying a variety of ways to make the streaming business profitable, from advertising to password-sharing crackdowns to cost cutting.
Streaming behemoth Netflix switched gears late last year and began offering a cheaper, ad-supported plan. Netflix was slow to embrace advertising, but as subscriber growth slowed, the company instituted the option in an effort to boost revenue.
…See? These streaming companies are not making money. Why? Very simple: they do not have enough subscribers to pay the bills. Why? Because their content sucks.
The rigged cable game is dead. These fascist, left-wing multinational corporations can no longer force all of us to pay $150 for cable/satellite TV subscriptions, where we pay a fortune to prop up dozens of networks we never watch. As people cut the cable cord and move to streaming, hateful companies such as Disney and the like are losing a fortune. Left-wing outlets such as CNN, ESPN, MTV, Comedy Central, the Disney Channel, etc., cannot survive on their own. The left-wing affirmative action of the rigged cable game keeps them afloat.
Except.
Now people are wising up. We are canceling our cable plans and moving to streaming, which is much cheaper. But not enough of us pay for these streaming services to keep them afloat. That’s why most of these streaming outlets are adding advertising. It’s another revenue source. You see, it’s easier to add commercials than it is to produce content people want to watch.
Here’s my helpful advice to these streaming outlets: create content we actually want to watch, and we will pay for it. Normal people want normal content. That means no woketardery, no lectures, nothing gay, and decent stories with characters we can relate to.
This is not difficult to do. Hollywood managed to do this for a hundred years.
Let me repeat: Normal people don’t want commercials. We want normal content.
John Nolte’s debut novel Borrowed Time (Bombardier Books) is available today. You can read an exclusive excerpt here.