Later this year, Paramount Plus and Showtime will team up to deliver a new US streaming platform: the not-so-creative name of Showtime’s Paramount Plus. Unfortunately, when they connect, existing Paramount Plus subscribers will see their monthly bills increase.
If you’re a US subscriber, the monthly cost of Paramount Plus will increase from $9.99/month to $11.99/month for the combined service, according to comments posted on Paramount’s recent Q4 2022 results report (opens in a new tab).
Perhaps more irritatingly, however, is the news that the Essential Paramount Plus tier – which doesn’t include access to new Showtime content – goes from $4.99 to $5.99 a month. So if you’re an existing Paramount Plus subscriber at any tier, you’ll see your bill increase in the third quarter of 2023 (i.e. July-September) – as that’s the unclear release date the company gave for Paramount Plus from Showtime.
While we expected Paramount Plus to see a post-merger price hike, it’s disappointing – especially after the recent news that Showtime recently canceled a series of shows and movies, including Let the right one in, american gigolo, AND On becoming a god in central Florida.
Those of you who don’t want to pay more to watch Paramount Plus’s best shows might want to try one of the other top streaming services, although they warn that some other services are taking a turn for the worse as well; in particular, Netflix further restricts Netflix password sharing and introduces paid password sharing policies in new regions.
If you’re subscribing to Paramount Plus from outside the US, you should be safe from the upcoming price increase, but we recommend keeping an eye out as we suspect the cost of the service will soon increase everywhere. During the earnings call, Paramount announced that streaming losses have increased to $575 million from $502 million in the fourth quarter of 2021, and we expect it to try to reduce those losses by increasing revenue.