After Netflix decided to block the ability to share accounts and raise the price of the subscription, the rest of the streaming services followed suit. This includes Amazon Prime Video, which began removing ad-supported features for Basic plan users after it started showing ads.
This was reported by German media 4KFilme, which revealed that Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision functions are being disabled for accounts that do not pay extra to remove the ads. It’s a controversial move that leaves users who already use these technologies and users who don’t experience worse picture and sound quality issues with ads.
If you don’t know, Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision are two technologies that work together to give you a more immersive audiovisual experience in movies and series. Of course, not all Prime Video content is compatible with these technologies.
In any case, Amazon now only makes these features available to users who pay extra for Prime Video, leaving users on a basic ad-supported plan without the option of HDR10 and Dolby Digital 5.1 (the only technologies available to them). have access from now on).
This doesn’t surprise us because Netflix also has a basic plan for ads that are limited in audiovisual quality. The good news is that they later reconsidered and increased the video quality on the ad-supported plan. So, we won’t be surprised if Prime Video regrets this move in a few months and leaves everything as before.
But, right now, it’s important to clarify that the plan with Prime Video ads hasn’t reached all countries, it doesn’t have the scale to remove Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision. Amazon may simply be experimenting and they won’t change anything in the end.
Either way, it’s clear that Amazon’s desire is to make all users pay a little more for premium video subscriptions. It remains to be seen if this strategy of restricting users will work… and what do you think of this move by Amazon?
