Amazon is shaking up its streaming setup once again, and this time, it’s giving the experience a brand-new name to go with it. Starting April 10, 2026, Prime Video‘s existing “Ad Free” subscription tier is getting a full rebrand — it will now be called Prime Video Ultra, and it’ll cost $4.99 a month. That’s the same price it launched at, but what’s changing is everything that comes with it.

The move is part of Amazon’s broader strategy to restructure how it packages its streaming service, drawing a cleaner line between what you get with a standard Prime membership and what you unlock when you pay a little extra. And honestly, for the price, the Ultra tier is now packing a lot more than it used to.​

Here’s what’s new: Prime Video Ultra subscribers will now get up to five simultaneous streams — that’s up from three — and up to 100 offline downloads, a significant jump from the previous cap of 25. On top of that, Ultra locks in exclusive access to 4K/UHD streaming and Dolby Atmos audio, features that are no longer available on the standard Prime Video benefit. So if you’ve been watching your favorite shows in stunning ultra-high definition and assumed it was just part of the deal — well, after April 10, you’ll need Ultra for that.

Now, to be clear, Amazon isn’t touching the cost of your regular Prime membership. That stays at $14.99 a month (or $139 a year), and you still get access to thousands of movies, TV shows, live sports, and now — newly added — Dolby Vision support at no extra charge. What’s changed is that the free tier is now genuinely the “watch with ads” experience, and the premium tier is getting a more fitting name and a beefed-up feature set to justify the add-on price.

For those who want to commit long-term, Amazon is also offering an annual plan for Prime Video Ultra at $45.99 per year — that’s a 23% discount compared to paying monthly. It’s a smart value play for anyone who’s already decided ads aren’t for them.​

To understand why this is happening, you have to rewind to January 2024, when Amazon quietly — and quite controversially — flipped the default experience for all Prime Video subscribers to include ads. Existing members woke up one day to find commercials interrupting their binge sessions, with a paid opt-out as the only escape. The company announced the change back in September 2023, framing it as a way to “continue investing in compelling content”. At the time, Amazon promised the ad load would be “meaningfully fewer” than linear TV — roughly two to four minutes per hour — but the backlash was real.

That decision, however, proved to be massively effective from a business standpoint. By late 2025, Prime Video’s ad-supported tier was reaching over 315 million monthly viewers globally, up from 200 million just a year and a half earlier. In the U.S. alone, that number sat at over 130 million monthly viewers. For comparison, Netflix — which launched its own ad-supported tier to much fanfare — reported 190 million monthly active viewers on its ad tier around the same time. Amazon’s scale in advertising is staggering, and it didn’t need to build a separate cheap tier to get there; it simply made ads the default.

The irony is that only about 10% of Prime Video viewers ever opted to pay the extra fee to remove those ads, which tells you a lot about how most people felt about shelling out for ad-free content. But that also means the 90% who stayed on the ad-supported tier became a goldmine for Amazon’s growing advertising business.​

Now, by rebranding the opt-out tier as “Ultra” and loading it with premium features — 4K, Dolby Atmos, more streams, more downloads — Amazon is essentially sweetening the deal to make the upgrade feel worth it for a more premium-minded audience. It’s a page straight out of Netflix’s playbook, which moved from offering ad-free as the baseline to making “Standard with Ads” the entry-level option, and then upselling premium features to subscribers willing to pay more.​

As for the content lineup, nothing changes based on which tier you’re on. Both standard Prime members and Ultra subscribers get access to the same massive library — that includes hit originals like Fallout, Reacher, The Boys, and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, along with original films like Road House and The Accountant 2, plus exclusive live sports coverage including the NFL, NBA, WNBA, NASCAR, NWSL, and The Masters. The difference is simply how you watch, not what you watch.

One important caveat worth noting: even with Prime Video Ultra, some content will still have ads. Live TV, sports events, and other select ad-supported programming are exempt from the ad-free promise. So if you tune into Thursday Night Football on Prime, you’re still going to see commercials — because, well, that’s just how sports broadcasting works.​

For now, Prime Video Ultra is only available in the United States, with no word yet on when — or if — it will roll out to other markets. Amazon has been expanding its advertising business across 16 countries, so international subscribers may not be far behind, but there’s no official timeline as of today.​

The bottom line is this: Amazon is streamlining its streaming tiers into something cleaner and more competitive. You either watch with ads as part of your Prime membership, or you pay $4.99 extra for an upgraded, premium, ad-free experience with all the bells and whistles. It’s a model the industry has largely converged on, and Amazon is now firmly in line with how Disney+, Netflix, and Peacock have structured their own offerings. Whether that feels fair to longtime Prime members who remember when the service was simply ad-free by default — that’s a separate conversation entirely.