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Amazon Prime Video Content to Include Ads Starting Early 2024

In a strategic move aimed at fueling further investment in captivating content, Amazon.com Inc. announced on Friday that it will introduce limited advertising to its Prime Video service beginning in early 2024.

This decision comes as Amazon joins the growing ranks of streaming platforms opting for an ad-based tier to bolster revenue streams. According to the company, the primary objective behind this move is to sustain its commitment to delivering high-quality content to its subscribers. In a blog post, Amazon stated its intention to maintain significantly fewer ads compared to traditional linear TV and other streaming providers, underscoring its dedication to a premium viewing experience.

The rollout of ads on Prime Video will commence in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada in early 2024, with additional markets, including France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia, set to follow later in the year.

For viewers who prefer an ad-free experience, U.S. consumers will have the option to pay an extra $2.99 per month. International customers can expect this ad-free choice to become available at a later date.

Amazon’s Prime Video has been making waves in the entertainment industry, receiving an impressive 68 PrimeTime Emmy award nominations this year. “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” a beloved streaming comedy, has garnered an impressive 80 nominations over five seasons, solidifying Prime Video’s presence in the highly competitive streaming landscape.

This announcement follows in the footsteps of Netflix Inc., which recently introduced an ad-supported tier to its lineup after years of resisting such a move. Netflix’s Chief Financial Officer, Spencer Neumann, noted that a substantial proportion of accounts are transitioning to the ad-supported option, acknowledging the challenges of building an advertising business within the streaming realm.

Both Amazon and Netflix find themselves navigating the challenges brought about by the ongoing strikes within the entertainment industry. The Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers have engaged in bargaining talks, aiming to reach a resolution that would bring an end to the production standstill. The strikes, with the Writers Guild of America beginning in May and actors represented by SAG-AFTRA joining in July, have disrupted the industry and heightened the importance of alternative revenue streams like advertising.

As the streaming giants adapt to evolving viewer preferences and revenue models, the inclusion of ads on Prime Video represents Amazon’s commitment to maintaining a diverse and competitive streaming ecosystem while continuing to invest in high-caliber content for its global audience.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

How to use Amazon Prime’s new ‘Dialogue Boost’ feature?

One of the most annoying situations when watching TV is when you are able to hear the explosions and background music of a particular scene but not the speech. Dialogue Boost, please.

In order to prevent consumers from being compelled to enable subtitles even when they don’t want to, Amazon Prime Video is introducing a new accessibility tool that enables users to boost the volume of dialogue without adding background music or effects.

Raf Soltanovich, the vice president of technology at Prime Video and Amazon Studios, stated in a statement, “At Prime Video, we are committed to delivering an inclusive, egalitarian, and pleasant streaming experience for all our consumers.

Also Read: What is Google Help Me Write?

“Our library of captioned and audio-described content keeps expanding, and by utilizing our technological capabilities to develop industry-first innovations like Dialogue Boost, we are taking another step towards creating a more accessible streaming experience,” the company said.

In order to use the feature choose a movie/series that offers this feature. You may check the title’s detail page if this feature is available. Start the movie and click the drop-down menus for the audio and subtitles on your screen. From the available options, select the Dialogue Boost level that you desire.

Based on how much you want to strengthen the dialogue, you can choose between “English Dialogue Boost: Medium” and “English Dialogue Boost: High”. You can choose between the Low, Medium, or High Dialogue Boost tracks.

Try them all out to determine the one that works most effectively for you since each level gives different levels of amplification, as their names suggest. Take pleasure in the title’s louder and more understandable dialogue.

Also Read: How is the new Google AI search different from the Bard chatbot?

In order to distinguish the conversation from the background noise in a movie or television show, it looks for instances where it is being overpowered by other sounds. Later, it uses AI to raise the dialogue’s quality.

In this manner, Dialogue Boost does not amplify the entire sound of the dialogue, simply the portions that require it before it is made available more broadly, the feature will first be made available globally for a select group of Amazon Original programs, including “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” “The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel,” and others.

It is accessible on all platforms that Prime Video supports. Even though Amazon is the very first global streaming platform to offer this capability, other platforms, including Roku, also offer a feature called “speech clarity.”

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Amazon provides Prime Members access to 100 Million Songs and more features

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Sandhya Gupta

When Amazon Prime first came out, it was a service that offered customers cheaper or free access to options for faster shipping. As the Prime members increased, the company also began introducing new features like access to its streaming video and music services.

Amazon revealed a new perk for its Prime members that may tempt some users away from competing services like Apple Music or Spotify.

There is good news for Amazon Prime members. Amazon will now provide 100 million songs in shuffle mode to Amazon Prime subscribers. Although Amazon Prime members do not have unlimited access to music on demand, shuffle mode does provide access to the whole collection.

Users can make playlists that are customized to their individual listening preferences and the songs are ad-free. Any artist, album, or playlist can be put on shuffle. This suggests that users must repeatedly skip through a huge number of tracks before finding the ones they want.

Amazon noted that “Prime members will now be able to stream more music than ever before. We’ve expanded the Amazon Music catalog for Prime members to include more than 100 million songs—up from 2 million—entirely ad-free.

Prime members can explore music and podcasts based on their likes; shuffle play any artist, album, or playlist in the catalog; and stream a collection of All-Access playlists tailored to personalized listening preferences on demand and available to download for offline listening.”

The company revealed that it will now provide Prime members with a complete music catalog with 100 million songs, as opposed to the earlier, more constrained selection of just 2 million songs, and will make the majority of the most popular podcasts on its site available without ads.

The move is a direct jab at rivals in the streaming music industry, particularly Spotify, which has been entering the podcast sector in an effort to increase revenue. However, despite paying for the service, Spotify’s paying subscribers are growing impatient with the fact that they still have to listen to podcast advertisements.

Amazon believes that the combination of a full music catalog and the promise of ad-free podcasts from Amazon Music will make it a strong substitute. Moreover, the Amazon Music app is getting a makeover, and a new “Podcast Previews” feature will enable users to listen to brief snippets in order to find new podcasts they might enjoy.

Recently, the company announced the availability of auto-generated, synced transcripts on a few podcasts for US users. For certain Amazon Originals podcast episodes, transcripts are available.

This is an excellent move by Amazon, given both Apple and Spotify indicated that they would look into raising the prices for its streaming services.

Amazon runs the online music store and streaming service known as Amazon Music. In January 2008, it became the first music store to offer music from numerous independent artists as well as the four major record labels (EMI, Universal, Warner, and Sony BMG) without digital rights management (DRM).

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Amazon Launches Amazon Music HD a High-Fidelity Streaming Service

Leave a Comment / News, Product, Tech News / By Yashica Vashishtha

Home deliveries, grocery, cloud computing, and what not? Amazon is doing everything. In fact, it was the first company to sell music without digital rights management from the four major music labels. But what is next? Well, we have got the news. After Amazon Music, Amazon is now launching its new HD music streaming service, named Amazon Music HD. It is an affordable music streaming service which can make Amazon leave its rivals like Apple Music and Spotify way behind in the competition with its HD music offering.

Currently, Amazon’s music streaming service only offers MP3 quality songs. But with the new service, the company is focussed on providing the users with the high-quality CD-like audio and is the first to offer high-fidelity digital audio through the subscription. For that, the company has added 24-bit CD-quality music to its Amazon Music platform, offering “Ultra HD” music. The subscription for the Amazon Music HD starts at $12.99 a month for the Prime users, and for the other users, the plan starts at $14.99 a month.

There is an offer for the current Amazon Music subscribers, under which they can get a trial of 90 days for the new HD music with just paying an extra $5 a month.

According to Amazon, with the subscription, the users will get access to 50 million songs that it calls “High Definition” having a sample rate of 44.1kHz. There will also be around 1 to 10 million ultra HD songs included in the subscription plan, with sample rates between 44.1kHz and 192kHz and ten times the bitrate of standard tracks. Also unlike the Tidal music’s MQA file format, the file format for Amazon’s HD songs will be lossless FLAC.

“We’re thrilled to make it possible for our customers to stream their favourite music the way artists intended their fans to hear it. From rock to hip-hop to classical and pop, we believe listening to music at this level of sound will make customers fall in love again with their favourite music and artists. As we usher in a new listening experience for our customers, we’re combining the convenience of streaming with all of the emotion, power, clarity and nuance of the original recordings.” Steve Boom, vice president of Amazon Music, said in a statement.

But even having subscribed to Amazon Music HD, only the users with latest technology device get to enjoy the HD and Ultra HD music through it. These devices include the second-generation or later Amazon Echo speakers, Fire TVs and Fire TV devices, Apple devices released after 2014 and running iOS 11 or newer, the Android devices released after 2014 having Android Lollipop or newer.

Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

www.xornor.co

Amazon Starts Testing its New Delivery Robots ‘Adora-bots’ in California

Leave a Comment / News, Product, Tech News / By Yashica Vashishtha

Maybe it is an attempt to eliminate the need for more manpower or maybe to increase the work efficiency, but Amazon is trying to get robots to its work field. The company has been testing its new blue coloured robots for a few months now. After making its new little delivery scouts stroll in the streets of Seattle (Amazon’s headquarter city), the company has started the tests for the same on the roads of California, now.

The little robots have been named the “Adora-bots”, which has got “Prime” imprinted over them. The robots will be roaming around the city and deliver the packages to Amazon customers.

The little delivery robots from Amazon are blue and have got six wheels. It uses batteries for power and moves at walking speed. In the past few months, the robots have been trained in a way that they get to know the maps of the city better, and for that, Amazon has used the 3D maps. It includes cameras and the ultrasonic sensors, which makes this robot capable of identifying any sort of obstacles on its way.

The company will be randomly choosing on who gets the delivery by these new robots, depending on the size and cost of the package as well as the place where it has to be delivered. The timings for the delivery for these robots will be only in the day time, and that too, between Monday to Friday.

Also, the robots will be under the surveillance of human scouts during the delivery, which the company has named as the “Amazon Scout Ambassadors”. They will accompany the robots to get it out of any kind of trouble and will also be answering the questions of the customers during the delivery.

The company has been bringing the robotics technology to its almost every operation to automate all the processes and increase the efficiency of its employees. Earlier, Amazon had introduced a collection of sorting robots in its warehouse, and before that, it tested delivering items using drones.

Amazon started the working on the Adora-bots in January 2019, and since then it has tested a bunch of six robots in the Seattle and Washington’s Snohomish County. The company undertook the tests in the daylight and in a different type of weather conditions to check its capabilities. Soon, the company may test the robots in other parts of the country as well.

Video Credit : Amazon YouTube Channel

Yashica Vashishtha

www.xornor.co

Amazon Teasing the Customers with Early Sale Prior to the Prime Day Sale on 15 July

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Yashica Vashishtha

The biggest sale of the year, the Amazon Prime Day Sale, is only ten days away, and Amazon has claimed that people will get the most attractive deals in the sale. The sale is to kick off on 15th of this month and is expected to be of a bigger scale even than the Black Friday. The event will last for two days and is only open for the Prime members.

According to the company, along with big discounts and offers, it will be launching over 1000 new products. The Prime users will get access to major discounts in almost every category available on the website, though the offers will be valid on limited stock.

But even before the sale, Amazon has come with major discounts on various products, including the popular Fire TV Recast, which the company is currently selling at the lowest price to date. There is also a big discount on the Amazon’s Alexa, along with few other Amazon devices, too, including Fire TV Stick 4K bundle, Echo Dot, etc. The company as a pre-sale has also put great discounts on smartphones, laptops, DSLR, and other electronic devices.

The upcoming Prime Day Sale though will have similar products on sale, but this time, the sale will go even cheaper. The company has promised ‘never before offers’ on select premium smartphones. For the sale, the company has put discounts on over 5000 other products in the electronics category.

Amazon will also put out a great discount (up to 60 %) on Books as well. In fact, the company is offering a three months subscription of Kindle Unlimited for free. On a regular basis, the fee for a month costs $9.99/£7.99 per user.

Though the offers are exclusively for the Amazon Prime members, you can get the 30-days free trial subscription to take advantage of the sale. And, if any person is from the U.S., they can get the same deals with three months for $9.99, whereas on the regular days they need to pay three times more for a subscription.

Yashica Vashishtha

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