If you’re wondering whether Amazon offers an annual ad-free version of Prime Video, it doesn’t. Instead, subscribers signed up for a yearly Prime membership or Prime Video subscription are required to pay for an additional monthly subscription to remove the ads.
Amazon introduced ads to Prime Video earlier this year, marking a major change to the way the streaming service operates and the user experience. Along with the introduction of ads, Amazon also introduced a new ad-free add-on that subscribers can add to their existing membership or standalone subscription.
Priced at $2.99 a month, the ad-free add-on adds an additional $36 a year to the cost of watching Prime Video without ads. In addition to the extra cost, there’s also currently no way to just sign up and pay that additional $36 in advance.
While this may change in the future, Prime Video subscribers wanting an ad-free streaming experience currently have to commit to a monthly payment, and regardless of whether they are already paying monthly or annually for the base plan.
Considering a monthly Prime Video subscription costs $8.99, upgrading to ad-free increases the cost to $11.98 a month. Likewise, with Prime membership costing $139 a year, subscribers can expect to pay $175 for an ad-free streaming experience over twelve months.
If interested in removing the ads, upgrading to ad-free can be done through the Prime Video website (under Account & Settings) or through the Prime Video app (under Settings) on a supported device.
Once added, subscribers can expect the ability to watch without ads and to continue paying the ad-free add-on cost each month. For those that don’t feel the add-on is worth the money, it is just as easy to remove the ad-free upgrade again. Removing the add works the same way as canceling a subscription in general, with subscribers retaining ad-free access for the remainder of the current billing cycle. After which, their subscription will revert back to the default ad-supported plan.
As a reminder, while upgrading to ad-free will remove the ads, subscribers should still expect to see commercials when watching live events, including live sports, or content that’s offered through Amazon’s FAST streaming service, Amazon Freevee. Likewise, any Prime Video Channels subscribed to through Amazon will continue to be ad-supported or ad-free based on the tier the subscriber originally signed up for.
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