Freevee is dead—well, dying. Per Deadline, the streamer, best known as a test balloon for whether Prime Video subscribers would tolerate ads, is being folded into Amazon’s video arm. Now that Prime Video does ads, Freevee is being made redundant. Over the next few weeks, Prime Video will slowly subsume Freevee and its content.
Freevee was best known as the streaming home of the Emmy-nominated hidden camera series Jury Duty and several other judiciary-themed reality-adjacent series, including Judy Justice and Tribunal Justice. It was a welcome landing place for dads of all stripes by continuing the Bosch legacy with Bosch: Legacy, and home to bizarre AI-generated posters of 12 Angry Men. These shows will move to Prime Video, and a “Watch for Free” tag will replace the Freevee designation. Freevee shows will remain available to people outside the paywall on Prime Video, and we presume the standalone app will also head to the great App Store in the sky.
Amazon sunsetting Freevee should come as little surprise. Many speculated that this was coming earlier in the year. Why the service even existed is a mystery. Born into this world as IMDB TV in 2019, Freevee was another streamer we probably spent too much time explaining to our loved ones, especially using the misnomer “it’s free.” It is free if you’re willing to tolerate some offensive ad placement in episodes of Columbo and Mad Men—IMDB TV didn’t do Mad Men’s awkward breaks any favors.
Freevee’s demise signals something we’ve been feeling for the last year: Streamers are more comfortable than ever shoehorning commercials into its overbudgeted prestige television, asking people to pay a subscription fee and tolerate its ads at the expense of the programming. Amazon spent half a billion on a Lord Of The Rings TV show that wasn’t edited or written with ads in mind, but that won’t stop Prime Video from haphazardly shoving them into the show. At the onset, Streaming promised high-quality entertainment at home for a subscription fee. A decade later, streamers have destroyed the entertainment ecosystem, subscription fees continue to rise, and we still have to deal with ads. The more commonplace commercials become in streaming, the more these companies diminish the deal and its product.
English (US) ·