Longer commercial breaks lower the value of ad-based streaming subscriptions

Amazon Prime Video subscribers aren’t the only streaming customers being subjected to longer commercial breaks lately. Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) Max has increased the amount of commercials it shows to US subscribers from approximately four minutes per hour to about six minutes per hour.

A US support page for Max currently says that subscribers to Max with ads “can expect about 6 minutes of ads per hour.” But PCWorld noticed this week that this differs from what Max used to claim, which as recently as February was “about 4 minutes” of ads an hour, per the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Some of Max’s geographies have smaller ad loads. For example, WBD's support page for Saint Kitts and Nevis says Max ad subscribers should expect about four minutes of ads hourly.

A 50 percent increase in the duration of commercials that US subscribers see puts Max’s ad load on par with that of Prime Video, which AdWeek reported last week also increased its ad load from four minutes per hour to six minutes per hour. For comparison, Netflix shows four to five minutes of ads per hour, according to earlier PC World reporting, and Peacock shows to five to seven minutes of ads hourly, per The Streamable.

However, when debuting the ad-based Max subscription tier, WBD promised that “Max will continue to offer one of the industry’s lightest ad loads.” In 2021, before WBD acquired Discovery and launched Max, a streaming service combining HBO programming with Discovery content and more, it introduced ads to its HBO Max streaming service, which included content from HBO, Warner Bros., DC Comics, Turner Classic Movies, and more. At the time, WBD said that “ads will not play during HBO programming.”

“Ads on HBO Max are designed to complement and enhance the overall viewing experience and will be thoughtfully surfaced across HBO Max’s content catalog in a way that maintains the integrity of the programming,” WBD’s June 2021 announcement said.

But that old promise to HBO Max subscribers hasn’t carried over to Max, even though WBD is renaming Max to HBO Max this summer. As PCWorld noted, Max has been showing ads during HBO original content like The Last of Us. The publication reported seeing three ad breaks during the show in addition to ads before the show started.

Ars Technica reached out to WBD for comment about these changes but didn’t receive a response ahead of publication.

Depleting value

With numerous streaming services launching over the past few years, many streaming customers have been pushed to subscribe to multiple streaming services to have access to all of the shows and movies that they want. Streaming providers also regularly increase subscription fees and implement password crackdowns, and ad-based subscriptions were supposed to offer a cheaper way to stream.

Streaming providers forcing subscribers to watch more commercials risk depleting the value of ad-based streaming tiers. Online, for example, people are questioning the value of their ad-based Max subscriptions, which start at $10 per month, compared to $17/month for ad-free Max.

“I don't how it could be worse. I watched several HBO documentaries, and they already had more adverts than Pluto TV [a free, ad-supported streaming service]. The kids programs for Cartoon Network started out with few adverts, but they have been loading up on adverts,” a Reddit user said in response to Max showing more ads.

Another Reddit user said that “if [Max] has ads, it shouldn't be $10/month.”

Beyond Max, PCWorld cited MediaRadar data finding that Disney+ shows over 5.3 minutes of ads per hour, and Hulu shows over seven minutes of commercials hourly.

Such lengthy commercial breaks can extend past a convenient snack or bathroom break and force subscribers to consider the value of their time and how much time they want to allocate to get through a 22-minute program, for example.

With linear TV reportedly showing 13 to 16 minutes of commercials per hour, though, streaming providers still have space to show even more ads while still claiming that they show fewer ads than alternatives.