At this point, sadly, who isn’t raising prices? We have to pay almost six dollars for eggs, mind you, and now we have to pay even more for yet another streaming service. During its quarterly earnings call this morning, Paramount Global broke the news that it will raise Paramount+’s subscription rates by two dollars, max. The essential plan with advertising will go from $4.99 to $5.99 (cheaper than eggs, hmmm), while the ad-free premium plan, which is currently $9.99, will be priced at $11.99 and will affect both new and existing customers. The upshot is that going forward, that ad-free premium plan will also include Showtime, and be christened “Paramount+ with Showtime†in a bit of a brand re-shuffle. (As of today, the current Paramount+ Premium bundled with Showtime costs $11.99. Oddly, the Essential tier of that bundle, which includes ads on Paramount+, is also… $11.99.) Paramount Global did not reveal an exact start date for the price increases, though The Hollywood Reporter writes that executives on the call did say it would come into effect in “the third quarter of 2023.â€
Paramount+ with Showtime is not the first streamer to raise its prices in the past year, joining the ranks of Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max. Like HBO Max with Discovery+, Paramount’s streamer is priming itself for its inevitable and more official merger with Showtime by doing cost reevaluation (a.k.a. pricier subscriptions), retiring some of its titles for tax write-offs, and moving them onto FAST platforms like Tubi, Pluto, and the Roku Channel as the company braces for a $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion hit this quarter.