Prime Video to End Paramount+ Subscription Service on March 31
By HiFi Editorial17 February 2026
Key Highlights
Prime Video will discontinue the Paramount+ add-on service in Japan on March 31, ending the ¥770 monthly subscription offering within the platform.
Active Paramount+ subscriptions will automatically terminate on March 31, even if the billing period extends beyond the official service shutdown date.
Customers with remaining paid days after March 31 will receive prorated refunds, credited back to their original payment methods, such as credit cards.
From a signal-chain perspective, the withdrawal of Paramount+ from Prime Video highlights the fragility of platform-level integrations rather than the content brand itself. Prime Video Channels operate as a middleware layer, abstracting playback, DRM, and adaptive bitrate logic into Amazon’s own pipeline. While this offers convenience, it also locks services like Paramount+ into Amazon’s encoding profiles and audio configurations, typically capped at standardized Dolby Digital Plus rather than the more aggressive bitrate ladders seen on native apps. For viewers running resolving AVRs and full-range speaker arrays, this often translated into competent but conservative sound—clean dialog, restrained LFE, and little room for dynamic headroom compared with disc or higher-bitrate OTT implementations.
