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Prime Video subs will soon see ads for Amazon products when they hit pause (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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As if the Prime Video app couldn't get any worse.

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[–] 133 points 2 years ago (8 children)

I actually get Prime TV series from the high seas even though I'm subscribed to Prime. It's simply better UX this way.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It's shocking how bad their ui is. I don't get it.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The sad thing is, it's much better than it was.

    You'd see a movie, read the truncated blurb, click into it to see the full details, only to get the exact same text in a bigger font, so you'd actually see less of it.

    I cancelled it the day they announced more ads.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    And just about anything you try to do to actually read the description would start the movie, including doing nothing for 10 secs (because you are fucking reading the description). Till you hit the back button which just boots you back to the home screen, so you can start the selection process all over again.

    Helpfully they do include IMDB scores when browsing for stuff, sadly all their stuff is total shite so all the scores are low. But hey, at least they include them.

    The only way to watch anything on Prime is to make your selection in advance somewhere else and then search for it. If you type in the literal title of the movie, it will mostly be in the top 10 of the search results. This includes resuming watching something you were watching, like their hit series Fallout. You would expect the resume watching thing to be proudly the first item on the home page. OMG you actually watched something of ours, we are so happy. Nope it's buried away on the 5th or 6th line and you need to scroll to get to it. It also happily resumes the previous episode at the credits, without the helpful next episode button. If you do manage to get to the next episode, you will need to watch the first 5 secs of same ad you've seen a million times (because they only seem to have the one ad on their platform) before you can skip to the content.

    I don't know what those guys are smoking, but their app is total garbage.

    Usually big corps collect all your personal information and tell you it's a good thing because they use it to make useful recommendations. That way you at least get something out of it. At Amazon they just take all your personal data and when it comes to recommendations it gives you a big middle finger. I don't know here's a romcom from 12 years ago, you like that stuff right? Whatever fuck off.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    It is weird how theyb collect so much data yet know so little about what I want to watch.

    I think Disney+ is actually somehow worse in that regard, since they have so much old content that I would doubtless watch when bored, but all they want to push is the latest reality TV shit that I have never once shown any interest in.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Same here. I have Prime but only for their Amazon Prime delivery services, not for their video or audio thing(Amazon refuses to unbundle their stuff in my country). To make it worse, Amazon Prime Video, Atleast last I tried didn't go to full HD(or even 720p) on Firefox on Linux, so there is no point to it.

    And there is hardly an ethical concern to it. I am paying for a service but getting my hands on the material; just via a different supply chain because Amazon sucks.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Amazon also horrifically mangles and compresses their video for seemingly no reason all the time.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's not for no reason, it's to lower bandwidth costs. It may not be a reason that benefits you but there is definitely a reason.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I think that's dependent on a lot of factors. Most of the highest quality webrips are from Amazon. Pretty sure there was less audio compression on their streams as well.

    But watching, you'd often see it lose all quality for seemingly no reason at all, and revert to something that wouldn't have looked out of place on RealPlayer on a 56K modem. I had this several times, and only reinstalling their useless app would fix it.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Yeah that’s the thing is that it’s almost random. As a guy with a network engineering degree that there wasn’t an identifiable issue with my network or devices when this would happen. No idea what would trigger it. Never had the same issue with any other streaming service.

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