Adverts arrived on Prime Video in Britain in early 2025, without much warning and without any change in what people were paying. One evening the films simply stopped running straight through.
There is a way to turn them off, and it costs money. But before you hand over that money there is something you should know, because for one group of viewers the ad-free option does not do what they are buying it for.
The important bit first
Paying for ad-free does not remove adverts from live sport.
That is reported consistently, and it matters enormously. Prime Video’s Champions League football on Tuesday nights is one of the main reasons a British household keeps the membership at all. Live content keeps its adverts for everybody, whether you have paid or not, because those breaks belong to the broadcast rather than to the on-demand library.
Two other exceptions sit alongside it.
| What you are watching | Does ad-free remove the adverts? |
|---|---|
| Films and series included with Prime | Yes |
| Amazon Originals on demand | Yes |
| Live sport and live TV | No |
| Add-on channels on their own ad-supported tier | No — those adverts are the channel’s |
| Free ad-supported programming inside the app | No |
So if your only complaint is breaks during the football, the add-on will not fix it and nothing will. Save the money. Our guide to watching football in the UK covers what each service actually gives you.
If your complaint is breaks in the middle of a film on a Sunday evening, read on, because that it does fix.
How bad are the adverts, honestly?
Less bad than the reaction suggested, which is worth saying plainly rather than joining in.
Prime Video in Britain runs roughly two to three and a half minutes of advertising an hour, in breaks of about three adverts each, placed before a programme and at points during it. They are fullscreen and you cannot skip them.
For comparison, ordinary commercial television in Britain averages around seven minutes an hour. So Prime Video’s load is somewhere between a third and a half of what you would get on ITV, and well under what the free ad-supported services run.
Something like three-quarters of UK Prime Video viewers are still on the ad-supported tier, which tells you most people have weighed it up and decided they can live with it. That is a reasonable conclusion rather than apathy.
If you want to know what genuinely free streaming looks like in Britain by comparison, our guide to free versus paid streaming works through it.
Option one: pay for ad-free
The straightforward route. Around £2.99 a month on top of whatever you already pay, as at October 2026. You sign up through the Prime Video website rather than through the television app, and once it is running it applies to every profile on the account.
Three things to weigh.
- It changes the real price of Prime. Add it to the membership and you are closer to twelve pounds a month than nine. That is a different comparison against Netflix or Disney+, as our guide to whether Prime Video is worth it in the UK sets out.
- It covers on-demand only, per the table above.
- The price may not hold. American subscribers saw their ad-free option restructured and made more expensive during 2026. Nothing has been announced for Britain and we are not going to claim otherwise, but the direction is clear enough.
If you take it and later change your mind, cancelling is straightforward, and our guide to cancelling UK streaming subscriptions covers the places people get caught out.
Option two: download before you watch
This is the trick nobody mentions and it costs nothing.
Downloaded titles play without adverts. Download an episode or a film to a phone or tablet over wifi, then watch it from the downloads section rather than streaming it.
The obvious limitation is that it only works on mobile devices, not on a television, so it suits commutes, flights and bed more than a family film night. The approach is the same one we set out in our guide to downloading for offline viewing.
Option three: buy the film
Titles you have bought outright are supposed to play clean, and generally do. If you own something and it starts serving you adverts, that is a fault rather than a policy, and worth raising with Amazon rather than accepting.
Renting sits in the same place. For one specific film on one specific evening, a rental is cheaper than a month of anything and comes without breaks. Our UK streaming availability guide shows how to check the options before committing.
What about ad blockers?
Worth addressing honestly rather than pretending the question is not asked.
Browser extensions can block adverts on the Prime Video web player, and some do it reasonably well today. We are not going to walk you through it, for three reasons that have nothing to do with squeamishness.
- It does nothing where you actually watch. No extension runs on a smart TV, a Fire Stick, a games console, a set-top box or the mobile app. If your viewing happens on a television, this is not an option at all.
- It is being engineered out. Amazon is moving to server-side ad insertion, which stitches the advert into the video stream itself rather than loading it separately. Once a break is part of the same file as the programme, there is nothing left for an extension to recognise. Anything that works now is working on borrowed time.
- It breaches Amazon’s terms of use, which is your decision to make rather than ours to encourage.
So it is a browser-only workaround, on a shrinking technical foundation, against the rules. For most people the download trick achieves more for less bother.
What does not work
- A VPN. The adverts are not geographic. Changing your apparent country will not remove them and may well break other things.
- Muting or looking away. The adverts are non-skippable, so the time passes either way.
- Switching to the standalone Prime Video plan. Same adverts, and at £7.99 against £8.99 for the full membership it is poor value anyway.
- Complaining to Amazon. This is a deliberate commercial model with a paid solution attached, not an error.
So what should you actually do?
Three honest answers depending on who you are.
If you mostly watch football on it: do not pay for ad-free. It will not help.
If you watch a lot of films and series and the breaks genuinely spoil them: pay the £2.99 and stop thinking about it. Two to three and a half minutes an hour across a month of viewing is a lot of interruption to tolerate for the price of a coffee.
If you watch occasionally: do not pay. Download what you care about, rent the one film you really want to see uninterrupted, and put up with the rest. At a third of broadcast’s ad load it is not the imposition it has been made out to be.
Common questions
How much does ad-free Prime Video cost in the UK?
About £2.99 a month on top of your existing membership, as at October 2026. Sign up through the Prime Video website.
Does ad-free remove adverts from live sport?
No. Live sport and live TV keep their adverts for everyone, including the Champions League football.
How many adverts does Prime Video show?
Roughly two to three and a half minutes an hour, in breaks of about three adverts, before and during programmes. Commercial television in Britain averages around seven minutes an hour.
Can I skip Prime Video adverts?
No. They are non-skippable and fullscreen.
Do downloaded Prime Video titles have adverts?
No. Downloading to a phone or tablet and watching offline is the one free way to avoid them, though it does not work on a television.
Does the ad-free option cover everyone on my account?
Yes. Once it is active, every profile on the account stops seeing adverts on on-demand films and series.
The short version
Ad-free costs around £2.99 a month and works properly on films and series. It does nothing for live sport, nothing for add-on channels and nothing for free ad-supported content, which is the part Amazon does not advertise. Downloading to a phone avoids adverts for free, and at two to three and a half minutes an hour the adverts themselves are lighter than the complaints suggest.
For everything else about the service, see our complete guide to Prime Video UK and our comparison of UK streaming services.
