Jason Snell writes about the consideration given to Amazon Prime:

Shocked—shocked!—to find that Amazon is putting ads in Prime Video – Six Colors:

when my wife and I were auditing our streaming subscriptions the other week, Prime was one of the ones that will basically never get cut, because free two-day delivery saves us money in the long run.

When Amazon Prime was a USA only thing, I lusted for it. Finally, Prime came to Australia and I jumped onboard at their low introductory price. Amazon sucked for the first year, with low availability and high prices. Over the past 18 months it has improved.

Even with their improvement, though, when it came time to review my annual subscription, it didn’t make the cut. I’m intentionally buying less and not having ready access to free shipping was almost a blessing. If I really want something, there are plenty of other Australian retailers that will take my money.

I’ve gone from being sad that Amazon is not in Australia, to extremely happy it hasn’t achieved total market dominance.

As for Prime Video? If I hadn’t already cancelled my subscription, adding adds to my paid video service would incentivise me to ditch them even more. The quest from all these services to squeeze more blood from the stone is simply going to steer me back towards Usenet.