By Michaela Gordoni
Amazon has another surprise for us — a nice new and shiny price hike for Prime Video…yay.
On April 10, the ad-free subscription service will become Prime Video Ultra in the US, priced at $4.99 per month. The new Ultra subscription includes up to five concurrent streams, up to 100 downloads for offline viewing, Dolby Vision support and exclusive access to 4K/UHD streaming, Variety reported.
It previously cost users $2.99 per month to use Prime Video without ads.
“Delivering ad-free streaming with premium features requires significant investment, and this structure aligns with other major streaming services while ensuring customers have the flexibility to choose how they want to watch,” Amazon said. “Prime members will continue to enjoy the core Prime Video benefit, including HD/HDR and now Dolby Vision, at no additional cost with their Prime membership.”
Related: Prime Video Ads Are Here to Stay, Court Rules
Amazon is also removing 4k streaming from the standard tier. So those without Ultra will only be able to stream 1080p content, Engadget pointed out.
This is an added cost to Amazon Prime subscription holders, who already pay $139 per year for its services.
Amazon previously faced a huge lawsuit from customers who claimed the company cheated them by adding ads into the service. A federal judge threw out the suit last year, saying that the ads addition is “not a price increase” but a “benefit modification” that was authorized under its subscriber agreements.
However, Amazon’s Prime subscriptions continue to grow, CNBC reported. In its February earnings report, it said Prime Video maintained an average ad-supported audience of more than 315 million viewers globally, which is up by an impressive 200 million from April 2024.
And advertising revenue for 2025 rose 22% year-over-year to $68.6 billion, making it third place in the digital ads market.
“We’ve kind of gotten used to seeing notes from these subscription services saying we’re raising our costs by $1, $2, $3, which doesn’t seem like very much,” Matt Schulz, a chief consumer finance analyst at LendingTree, recently told CBS News. “But when you factor in that some people subscribe to 10 or 15 different things, a couple of dollars a month extra on all of those adds up to real money over the course of the year.”
It will be interesting to see how consumers respond to Amazon’s price hike. Given that it’s such a hugely influential company in the US, it’s unlikely that Americans will cancel their subscriptions, but many may choose to go without the luxury of ad-free services and 4k streaming.
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