When consumers subscribe to Amazon Prime, they get free shipping, access to Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Music, and other benefits.  Up until early 2024, Amazon Prime Video was essentially ad-free.  

In late December 2023, Amazon notified Prime members that it planned to start showing commercials on Amazon Prime Video, but that if customers wanted an ad-free version, they could get it for an additional fee of $2.99 per month.  Some customers then sued, alleging that Amazon's introduction of commercials to the video service, combined with offering an ad-free version for an additional fee, breached Amazon's terms of service.  

Amazon moved to dismiss, and a federal district court in Washington dismissed the case.  Here's why. 

Amazon's terms of service say that the fee payable for a subscription to Amazon Prime won't be increased until a customer chooses to renew the subscription.  The question presented to the court, then, was whether the introduction of commercials to the service – and the offering of an ad-free version for additional cost – constituted a price increase. 

Significantly, the court focused on whether Amazon had actually promised that Amazon Prime Video would be ad-free, and the court held that it had not.  The court wrote, “It is undisputed that Amazon never promised Prime subscribers – in writing or otherwise – that its streaming service was, or would remain, ad-free.”  The court also noted that Amazon's terms specifically gave Amazon the right to change the benefits being provided.  

Therefore, although Amazon Prime Video may have been ad-free when the customers subscribed, the court held here that customers didn't buy a service that was guaranteed to be ad-free.  And because Amazon didn't change the subscription price consumers were required to pay, the offering of an ad-free version for an additional fee didn't constitute a price increase.  

The court explained, “It is true that Amazon's introduction of commercials to its streaming service, for those Prime members who chose to pay more to keep their streaming ad-free, ultimately had an effect on those subscribers' wallets tantamount to a ‘price increase.’ The Court, however, is completed to maintain the distinction between a benefit removal and a price increase for several reasons.  First, this distinction is repeatedly reinforced in the contracts themselves.  Benefit modifications and removals are expressly authorized throughout both contracts; price increases are circumscribed and allowed only according to certain conditions . . . . The expressly distinct treatment of these things makes little sense if one could turn a benefit removal into a price increase by simply recharacterizing it as such.” 

What's particularly interesting to me about this lawsuit is the emphasis the court placed on the fact that Amazon had never promised that the service would be ad-free.  If Amazon had been specifically promoting the service as ad-free, and consumers had relied on those claims, this case could have come out very differently – even though the terms of service allowed Amazon to make changes to the service at any time.  This highlights the importance of ensuring that when you make advertising claims about ongoing benefits that you will be providing, you ensure that you're committed to providing those benefits over the long term.  

In re Amazon Prime Video Litigation, 2025 WL 437743 (W.D. Wash.  2025).