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Amazon recently launched its new ad-supported tier for Prime Video. This makes it the latest streaming service to offer both ad-free and ad-supported tiers. While this service is still new, it’s already sparked some controversy and even a class-action lawsuit. Apparently, if you are using the Amazon Prime Video ad-supported tier, you will lose Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos support.
If you’re an Amazon Prime member, then Amazon Prime Video is included with your subscription. The service costs $14.99/month. However, if you want to watch Amazon Prime Videos without ads, then it will add an additional $3 to your plan making it $17.99/month. If you are a non-prime subscriber, and you just want to use Prime Video, the service starts at $8.99/month. If you want to remove ads, it gets boosted to $11.99/month. Both prices are $1/month more expensive than the two payment tiers of Disney+.
You don’t get Dolby Atmos or Dolby Vision with the Amazon Prime Video ad-supported tier
Users are pretty outraged at Amazon right now. When using Amazon Prime Video, you have heightened visuals and audio with the addition of Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision. This is something that movie lovers love, and people were hoping that the ad-supported plan would retain these good features. However, that’s not the case. If you’re using the ad-supported Amazon Prime Video payment tier, your video will be capped at 4K HDR10 with Dolby 5.1 audio.
The main thing that really ticked off the users is the fact that Amazon did not tell anyone about this. The company quietly took these features away, and people had to find out the hard way. 4KFilme conducted a test where testers enabled the ad-free plan (both features were there). Then, the testers enabled the add-supported plan (the features were gone).
This, obviously, upset many users. They were not told that these features were being taken away. Now, in order to access them, they have to pay even more money every month. The issue is that they were already paying for Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision before Amazon unveiled the changes. Now, Amazon is demanding $3 more every month for something they were already paying for.
This is only made worse by the fact that streaming service prices are constantly going up. One thing we can say is that Amazon does not plan on increasing the price of the ad-supported plan this year. However, this does not account for any time after this year.