Amazon is facing a class-action lawsuit after it recently began charging Prime Video subscribers extra to avoid seeing ads.
Filed February 9th in California federal court, the proposed lawsuit alleges that Amazon is guilty of breach of contract and violating state consumer protection laws with the change. Specifically, the lawsuit argues that Amazon has changed the terms of users’ subscriptions by making the ad-enabled Prime Video tier the default membership.
As of February 5th, Prime Video members have to pay an additional $2.99/month to remove ads (and, as it turns out, get Dolby Vision and Atmos support). “Subscribers must now pay extra to get something they already paid for,” notes the lawsuit.
The lawsuit seeks at least $5 million and a court order barring Amazon from what it argues is further deceptive conduct committed against users who subscribed to Prime before December 28th, 2023.
The full proposed class-action lawsuit can be found here.
Of course, this is a U.S.-based lawsuit, but the ads did roll out to Canada and other markets, so it remains to be seen what sort of pushback, if any, might also happen elsewhere.
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