Prime Video to include ads in shows from 2025 to fund content investments

The e-commerce giant’s over-the-top streaming platform, Prime Video, will include advertisements in shows and films for Indian viewers from next year.

The company made this announcement through its blog post on Tuesday, explaining that this decision to include advertisements is aimed at generating funds for content investments.

“We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers,” said the company in a statement. “We will also offer a new ad-free option and will share the price of that option at a later date. We’re not making changes in 2025 to the current price of Prime membership,” the statement added.

The existing Prime membership fee will stay the same for users who choose the ad-supported option. Prime Lite members will continue to have ads included in their current plan, and more details will be provided closer to the launch date.

This move highlights the stiff competition in India’s streaming market amid a challenging period for the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) segment.

The audience for over-the-top (OTT) platforms has grown by 14 per cent year-on-year to 547.3 million users, according to the Ormax OTT Audience Report: 2024. The SVOD audience segment has seen a decline this year, and the growth of the OTT universe has been solely driven by the advertising-based video-on-demand (AVoD) audience segment, which has grown by 21 per cent, the report added.

The ongoing $8.5 billion merger between the media assets of Reliance Industries and The Walt Disney Company is expected to capture a majority of the audience in the online streaming market, according to some media reports.

In the US and other countries, Prime Video introduced advertisements in its streaming service earlier in 2024.

Recently, Amazon also announced the acquisition of select assets of MX Player, including the MX Player app, to merge with its ad-supported video-on-demand (AVoD) service, Amazon miniTV.