The streaming landscape continues to shift, with Paramount+ getting a higher price as it absorbs Showtime content starting June 27, 2023.
The price increase wasn’t unexpected — Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra said as much on the company’s third-quarter 2022 earnings call. “We definitely see opportunities to increase price on Paramount+,” Chopra said at the time in response to Deutsche Bank’s Brian Kraft. “And you will see us do that in the future. I think it’s fair to say that pricing is moving higher across the industry — you see that with a number of competing services, and we think that that means we have room to increase price.”
The details: The ad-supported plan is moving from $5 a month to $6 a month. The premium plan — which also includes the ability to watch some shows in 4K resolution, and download content for offline viewing — goes from $10 to $12.
And if you want to watch that Showtime content, you’ll need to pony up for the more expensive of the two plans.
The change really marks the end of Showtime as a standalone service. (It also kills off the ad-free Paramount+ plan that didn’t include Showtime.) And the brand itself is going to become the more awkward “Paramount+ with Showtime” later this year.
It’s not quite as sweeping a change as HBO Max and Discovery combining to become the truncated (in name, at least) Max service — Showtime has been a part of the Paramount family for a long, long time. But it’s still a pretty big sea change when it comes to branding. Showtime was the CBS/Paramount answer to HBO (which has changed hands a couple of times in the past few years), but it never had the same sort of brand awareness or depth of shows, despite the occasional hit. So this is more of a traditional consolidation.
And it shouldn’t change the availability of Paramount+, which can be found on every major streaming platform. The streaming service currently stands at about 60 million subscribers, with total global viewing hours up some 50% year over year.
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