As streamers slowly wake up to the realization that their business model is fundamentally flawed now, as many of our beloved Outposters (peace be upon them as superior online movie beings) have been saying for nearly two years, they have pretty much all lurched towards advertisements to close revenue gaps. In the process, they have broken the covenant that existed between the platform and the customer. Amazon was the latest.
As a result, Amazon is reportedly facing a class action lawsuit. This was filed on Friday in California federal court, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Ads have now started to roll on Prime Video. However, unlike Netflix, Disney+ and the others, Amazon has done it differently. When they implemented ads on most streamers, they simply added an ad-supported tier to their existing set of options. If you already had an account there it remained the same (and ad-free) so you had to opt for the cheaper tier with ads.
Amazon simply rolled out ads as a default to all 100 million subscribers, then offered going ad free as an optional extra for $2.99 a month. This applied to everyone, even people with annual subscriptions they only renewed, and paid for, days ago.
So these people are going into bat. The class action claims breach of contract and violations of state consumer protection laws. Their subscriptions were altered mid-contract and the suit states:
“Subscribers must now pay extra to get something they already paid for…”
It also labels this practice as “unfair” and claims Amazon is “deceptive”.
The suit seeks $5 million and a court order barring Amazon from engaging in further deceptive conduct on behalf of users who subscribed to Prime prior to December 28th last year.
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