Amazon Prime Video: Advertising subscription with poorer picture and sound?

If you don’t want to watch advertising, you will certainly want to avoid the cheaper Amazon Prime Video advertising subscription. But apparently the quality of the inexpensive entry-level subscription is also said to be worse than that of its ad-free counterpart. This probably applies to the picture and sound.

Loss of quality in picture and sound

Of course, streaming providers are not immune to the global rise in energy costs. After all, they also have to pay operating costs for their power-hungry server farms. However, instead of just increasing the costs for existing subscription models, industry king Netflix decided to introduce an ad-financed subscription in 2022. This was intended to provide customers with inexpensive access to the streaming service and ensure Netflix earned money from advertising customers in return. Amazon has now copied this model and has been offering its in-house video platform to Prime customers for three euros more per month since the beginning of February.

If you don’t want to pay the extra costs, you can opt for the version with advertising. But unlike Netflix and Disney, the ad-financed version of Prime Video was supposed to come without any loss of quality. However, what was once a promise may now have become a farce. After all, there appears to be neither Dolby Vision nor Dolby Atmos. For customers, this means that they will have to do without both dynamic HDR and 3D sound in the version with advertising. Is that really worth a saving of three euros?

Amazon Prime Video in a hardware test by c’t

The confusing thing about the inferior quality is the fact that Amazon does not dispense with the logos for the picture and sound standard, even in the advertising subscription. Consumers therefore assume that they can enjoy series and films with the same quality. However, a test by our colleagues at c’t has now raised justified concerns about the information, as reported by heise online. The hardware specialists used devices that support both Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos and found that the standards were simply not reproduced. In addition to 5.1 sound, there was also only a static HDR image. Although the streaming service only offered the premium standards for selected content anyway, this is still annoying. We can only hope for a technical or price correction from Amazon.