Amazon announces change to streaming platform
The Freevee termination comes after Amazon confirmed its plans to shut down the service and place all its content under the Prime Video brand . As a result, all Freevee originals will be moved to Amazon's streaming service and made available to non-Prime members under the 'Watch for Free' section.
The company began taking steps to end Freevee last year by launching ads on Prime Video , which is included in a Prime membership for $14.99 a month, or as a stand-alone service for $8.99. Members can also pay an additional $2.99 to remove ads. Launched as IMDB Freedive in 2019, the service rebranded to IMDB TV before turning into Amazon Freevee in 2022.
The ad-supported version of Prime Video later expanded to the UK, Germany, and Austria, and by November 2024, 44 percent of US Freevee viewers did not have Prime Video accounts, according to Ampere Analysis . While there are currently over 200 million Prime Video streamers, some members have been unimpressed with the company as a whole in recent years.
Some of the fury was ignited after the company opted to raise its annual membership price to $139 from $119 in 2022. It started becoming 'unbearable' for some customers in January after they noticed the high number of ads in TV shows and films .
Besides the streaming service issues, some shoppers have threatened to delete their Amazon accounts after the company axed a same-day delivery perk , raised the price of Amazon Music Unlimited , and discontinued its Try Before You Buy service . But Amazon is now expanding its same-day and next-day delivery services to over 4,000 small cities, towns, and rural communities.
The move is meant to help shoppers who have limited delivery options. The company is now hard at work in preparing to launch its Prime Day sales event . The now four-day sales special has already begun offering early deals , including a $1/gallon discount on gas .
Freevee is not the only streaming service to shut in recent years. Quibi, a service that featured reboots of Punk'd and Singled Out, crashed and burned eight months after its launch in 2020 . Prior to its demise, Quibi was exploring potential sales options a month before announcing the shutdown and faced backlash for paying Reese Witherspoon $6 million to narrate a show on the platform.
The Crackle platform ceased operations in 2024 after 20 years of operation. At the time, most of its stake was owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, the owner of Redbox that filed for bankruptcy . With these streaming platforms biting the dust, Prime Video's primary competition includes services like Netflix , Hulu, Peacock, and HBO Max.
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"Third parties do not tend to have a long lifetime in American politics. Often, they are bugbears to one particular party, and this might be the case with Musk's proposed America Party," Dafydd Townley, who teaches at the University of Portsmouth, told Newsweek. "If anything, the new party would likely split the Republican vote, potentially resulting in a Democrat-dominated House of Representatives, at least in the short term, due to the winner-takes-all electoral system." If anything's certain, the rocket-building Musk doesn't shy away from a challenge. He appears confident in fighting what appears to be an uphill battle. In response to an X user posting about how he could 'break the two-party stranglehold,' Musk replied: 'Not hard tbh.'
