Prime Video: Amazon wants to show ads when users click pause

Prime Video is getting more ad formats: In future, users will be able to buy products directly in the app. And there will be ads when playback is paused.

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In future, Amazon wants to show Prime Video users ads even when they pause playback.

(Bild: Shutterstock.com; Diego Thomazini)

2 min. read
This article was originally published in German and has been automatically translated.

Amazon wants to show significantly more advertising in the basic Prime Video subscription. In a blog post aimed at advertising customers, the company presents new advertising formats that will enable shopping for advertised products directly via the smart TV remote control.

While many interactive ads will run in the designated advertising slot, Amazon has discovered an additional opportunity to display ads to its users. In future, advertising formats can also be played when users press the pause button to stop playback.

Amazon explains that special transparent advertising panels can be displayed when playback is paused. Brands can place their advertising messages there and hope that users will add displayed products to their shopping cart with their remote control or press "Learn more", which sends an email to the user account.

"These ads go beyond a traditional ad break, as the interactive overlay is available to customers for as long as the content is paused," Amazon praises the new advertising format in the blog post. In practice, this means that users will be shown more advertising than before.

It is unclear when and where the new ads will be implemented. Amazon does not provide any information on this in the blog entry. Amazon plans to announce further details at its upfront conference on May 14.

Since February 5, the Amazon streaming service Prime Video has been showing commercial breaks in films and series as standard. If you don't want to watch the commercials, you have to pay an additional 3 euros per month. With the commercial breaks on Prime Video, Amazon is following the example of its competitors Netflix and Disney+, which already have advertising subscriptions in their portfolio.

According to Amazon, Prime Video reaches 200 million advertising customers worldwide every month. According to internal Amazon studies, interactive advertisements lead to ten times as many views of product pages as traditional formats, the company writes.

(dahe)