The streaming landscape continues to shift, and Paramount+ will be priced higher 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 absolutely see opportunities to increase the price of Paramount+,” Chopra said at the time in response to Deutsche Bank’s Brian Kraft. “And you’ll see us doing that in the future. I think it’s fair to say that prices are moving higher across the industry – you see that with a number of competing services, and we think that means that we have room to increase the price.”
The details: The ad-supported plan moves from $5 per month to $6 per 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 have to snag the more expensive of the two plans.
The change really marks the end of Showtime as a stand-alone service. (It also kills 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 (at least in name) Max service — Showtime has been 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 few times in the last few years), but it never had the same kind 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 all major streaming platforms. The streaming service currently has around 60 million subscribers, with total global viewership up around 50% year over year.
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