🦔 Amazon announced Prime Video Ultra, a new $4.99/month tier launching April 10 that replaces the current $2.99/month ad-free option. The price is on top of a standard Prime subscription ($14.99/month or $139/year). New features include five concurrent streams instead of three, 100 downloads instead of 25, and exclusive access to 4K/UHD streaming. That last part means 4K is moving behind the paywall. If you want ad-free streaming in 4K, you're now paying $20/month for Prime plus Ultra. My Take I wrote about YouTube doing the same thing last week. Make the free experience worse, make the cheap tier worse, then introduce a premium tier with features that used to be standard. Amazon already added ads to Prime Video and charged $2.99 to remove them. Now they're raising that to $4.99 and locking 4K behind it. The 4K part is the move that will get people because plenty of subscribers didn't care about ads but will care about losing picture quality they already had. Amazon's statement says this aligns with other major streaming services, which is true. Everyone is doing this. Netflix has ads now. Disney has ads. The streaming price wars that kept costs low are over and now we're in the extraction phase where every service figures out how much they can charge before people cancel. The product gets worse in steps small enough that most people just accept it. That's the playbook. Hedgie🤗