- Streaming providers are adding more commercials, as recently confirmed for Prime Video.
- It turns out that Max already did the same thing earlier this year.
- Back in February, Max raised ad loads from 4 minutes an hour to 6 minutes an hour.
Inflation sucks, but at least when a company directly raises prices, the impact is transparent. A lot of times, though, the effect is obscured by companies minimizing actual price hikes, and instead just giving us less for our money — you might see this at the grocery store in the form of sizes getting smaller. With streaming media, a company can achieve the same thing by reducing the quality of the service it offers, and one to do that which is a lot more subtle than dropping half your licensed content is just by squeezing in more ads.
Last week we heard about Amazon’s Prime Video increasing the amount of advertising it showed from 2–3 minutes an hour to 4–6 minutes. We didn’t love that, but it turns out Amazon is far from alone here, and PCWorld has uncovered evidence that Max (or soon to once again be HBO Max) has quietly done basically the same thing.