Most people are missing the point. Amazon loses massive amounts of money on Prime Video and its Fire hardware. Like hundreds of millions of dollars massive.
Amazon is willing to lose money on these products if they can bring you into their ecosystem and sell you other products. For example, Prime customers spend hundreds of dollars more per year on physical goods than non-Prime customers. So Amazon wants to hook you in with Video and then make money from from selling you silicone baking mats, cloud storage, Kindle books, and whatever else.
While people in the Google / Android ecosystem might not like Amazon's stance (myself included), it makes perfect sense from a business perspective. Amazon can't succeed in the long-term if they don't control the ecosystem. Amazon really learned this lesson when Apple tried forcing them to sell books through Apple's bookstore, where Amazon would have given up 30% of every sale on items that Amazon only makes 5% on.
Edited for clarification.
Very well written and illustrates my frustrations perfectly.
I could not have said it better, amazon needs to pull their head out of their ass.
Good article. If I didn't order everything in the known universe with Amazon Prime I would absolutely cancel my subscription out of principle. I barely ever use Prime streaming, I only turned it on last night because I wanted to check out men in the high castle, so I had to boot up my PS4 which was collecting dust before this.
Awesome article. Honestly if Amazon didn't offer same day shipping with reasonable prices I would have canceled my Prime membership years ago. Once I lose my student pricing I probably will cancel, now that I think about it. It's inexcusable that they leave such a large user base without content.