Streaming services keep getting more expensive: all the latest price increases

Just like it did last summer, Paramount Plus is getting ready to hike the prices on some of its streaming service subscriptions.

Paramount announced today that, beginning August 20th, the monthly costs for its Paramount Plus with Showtime, Paramount Plus Essential, and Paramount Plus with limited commercials plans will increase for all new subscribers. Paramount Plus with Showtime will now cost $12.99 a month ($1 more expensive), Paramount Plus with limited commercials will now cost $7.99 a month, and Paramount Plus Essential will now cost $7.99 a month ($2 more expensive).

Max has announced a price increase on the streaming service’s ad-free plans. The standard ad-free plan will cost $16.99 / month instead of $15.99, while the 4K ad-free plan will cost $20.99 / month instead of $19.99.

The price increase will go into effect today for new subscribers. Existing subscribers can expect to see the increase from their next billing cycle on or after Thursday, July 4th. Max’s price hike also affects the service’s ad-free yearly plans, with the standard ad-free plan going up to $169.99 / year from $149.99 and the 4K ad-free plan going up to $209.99 / year from $199.99.

Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max are teaming up for a new bundle this summer, Netflix is focused on the WWE and celebrity boxing, Disney Plus is getting ESPN, and Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Max could get a price hike. A familiar refrain emerged around all this news: streaming is becoming cable TV all over again and getting crummier in the process.

And it's true! When streaming first emerged, it was a beautiful alternative to piracy, which was very convenient and very illegal, and cable, which was festooned with ads and weighed down by channels you were paying for and didn’t want. Streaming gave you a world of content on demand for a fraction of the cost of cable.

There’s a new streaming bundle coming to town. Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are teaming up to offer Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max in a bundle that will become available in the US this summer.

The new bundle will include both ad-supported and ad-free options, but there’s still no word on how much it will cost. Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery say they will share “additional details” about the bundle in the “coming months.” Once available, you’ll be able to purchase the bundle from Disney Plus, Hulu, or Max’s website.

Peacock is getting another price hike. Starting this summer, Peacock’s ad-supported Premium plan will go from $5.99 to $7.99 per month, and its Premium Plus plan will increase from $11.99 to $13.99 per month.

The $2 increase will take effect on July 18th for new customers, while current subscribers will see the price hike on August 17th. Meanwhile, the annual plans will cost  $79.99 for Premium and $139.99 for Premium Plus. Peacock raised prices across both of its plans last year — and that was after it took away its free membership for new users.

Netflix is moving beyond subscriber numbers. In its first quarter earnings results released on Thursday, Netflix announced that it will stop reporting quarterly membership numbers in 2025 because subscribers are “just one component” of its growth. The change comes after a quarter where it added 9.3 million subscribers, growing to more than 270 million members globally.

Subscriber count meant everything in the early days of streaming. It allows investors, studios, and everyone else to gauge just how well a streaming service is doing compared to the competition, and Netflix has leaned on its lead in that area.

Disney Plus already has rules in place to prevent subscribers from sharing their passwords — but now we have an idea when it will start making users pay to share them. In an interview on CNBC, Disney CEO Bob Iger says the company plans on “launching our first real foray into password sharing” in June.

Iger says the rollout will start in “just a few countries in a few markets” before expanding to all subscribers in September. Disney’s anti-password sharing rules initially went into effect for new subscribers on January 25th and were rolled out to existing members on March 14th. Netflix became the first streaming service to crack down on password sharing in 2023, as it began charging users an extra $7.99 per month to add an extra viewer outside their household.

Nvidia’s completely free, no-strings attached trial of its cloud gaming service GeForce Now is about to be very slightly less of a deal — on March 5th, Nvidia tells The Verge, users will start seeing ads.

They’re only for the free tier — not Priority or Ultimate — and even then, it sounds like they won’t interrupt your gameplay. “Free users will start to see up to two minutes of ads while waiting in queue to start a gaming session,” writes Nvidia spokesperson Stephenie Ngo.

Netflix confirms to The Verge that it has begun booting longtime subscribers off their Apple iTunes billing plans in some countries and will require them to pay Netflix directly using a credit card or debit card instead. As first reported by Cord Cutter News, Netflix has begun telling customers in “some territories” that their plans would need to be switched over. Netflix spokesperson MoMo Zhou told The Verge in an email that the change affects “members on the basic plan who were using an iTunes method of payment,” and later added that this includes Canadian and US users.

It’s been a good run for anyone who signed up before Netflix stopped accepting subscriptions through Apple’s payments system. One person indicated today on X that they’d kept the streaming service’s old $9.99 price for years.

Amazon has confirmed it’s not a mistake — your Amazon Prime Video subscription no longer includes Dolby Vision HDR or Dolby Atmos surround sound. That’s on top of the ads that Amazon injected into the service on January 29th. Now, when you pay $2.99 a month to remove those ads, you can get Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos back as well.

That’s the word from 4KFilme, which discovered that their smart TVs from Sony, LG, and Samsung were now displaying content in HDR10 with Dolby Digital 5.1 as opposed to the higher fidelity options they’d enjoyed previously.

Funimation is shutting down on April 2nd, 2024. The anime streaming service will start migrating existing subscribers to Crunchyroll — a move that will not only affect subscription prices, but will also wipe digital libraries.

A support page on Funimation’s website says the service will automatically transfer existing subscribers to Crunchyroll, noting that the transfer “may vary depending on your specific payment platform, subscription type and region.” But the page — unhelpfully — doesn’t say how much subscribers will have to pay following the transition, only that legacy subscribers will see a price increase. You’ll have to check your email to see how much you’ll have to pay.

Disney’s password-sharing crackdown will officially begin this summer. During an earnings call on Wednesday, Disney chief financial officer Hugh Johnston said Disney Plus accounts “suspected of improper sharing” will see an option to sign up for their own subscription.

Disney will also start letting account holders add people outside their household for an “additional fee” — but it didn’t say how much that will cost. “We want to reach as large an audience as possible with our outstanding content,” Johnston said. “We’re looking forward to rolling out this new functionality to improve the overall customer experience and grow our subscriber base.”

In case the hubbub of the holidays made you forget all about (or completely miss) Amazon’s news about putting ads in Prime Video, we’re here to remind you that commercials are coming today — unless you pay more money, of course.

Amazon just so happened to break the news right after Christmas, leaving a lovely email in users’ inboxes (that most people probably weren’t even checking at that time) to announce the rollout of ads. The new ad-free plan will cost an extra $2.99 per month, bringing your $14.99 per month Prime subscription to $17.98 per month or your $8.99 per month standalone Prime Video subscription to $11.98 per month. You won’t be automatically transferred to the new ad-free plan, but you can “preorder” the new tier from Amazon’s website.

This last weekend I was sitting in a hotel room in Memphis, staring out at the parking lot turned ice skating rink, wanting to just have a couple of hours with my brain turned off. I opened Netflix hoping to find a movie that would give me an evening’s respite. Scrolling down to the top 10, I was met with a who’s who of the 2010s and 2020s. Cowboy & Aliens, the 2011 flop with a great cast, was on the list. Queenpins, the 2021 flop with a great cast, was also there. At the top of the list was The Legend of Tarzan, a 2016 flop with a great cast. Rounding out the top 10 was a Sylvester Stallone flick from 2019 and a handful of new releases I’d heard nothing about until I saw them in the top 10 list.

In a highly competitive streaming market where every streaming service is fighting for your limited dollars, it feels like a not great thing that Netflix’s top 10 list could be mistaken for the lineup at TNT. But it also feels like that might be Netflix’s plan. Just today, it announced it was going to be the new official home of one of basic cable’s crown jewels: WWE Monday Night Raw. And yesterday, the company announced the departure of Scott Stuber, who oversaw Netflix film’s three consecutive years as the most nominated film studio at the Academy Awards.

Although Netflix no longer allows new or returning members to sign up for the ad-free Basic subscription that costs $11.99 per month, company executives told investors while reporting its earnings results today that it’s retiring the plan in some countries where ad-supported plans are available. It’s starting with Canada and the UK in the second quarter of this year.

That leaves subscribers with Netflix’s $15.49 per month option as Netflix’s cheapest ad-free plan. Going from $11.99 to $15.49 per month is a pretty big jump, and means there’s really no middle ground for ad-free plans. Otherwise, subscribers will have to pay $6.99 per month for its ad-supported basic plan or $22.99 per month for the Premium tier. Netflix stopped letting new subscribers sign up for its Basic plan in Canada last year before rolling out the change to the US and UK.

Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th. “This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,” the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to “limited advertisements.”

“We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership,” the company wrote. Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements.

When HBO Max transformed into Max back in May, Warner Bros. Discovery said that existing subscribers on the ad-free plan would be able to hang onto certain perks (like 4K streaming) for at least the next six months without needing to spend more money. Well, we’re about to hit that six-month mark, and right on cue, the party’s over. That’s all, folks.

Max is emailing affected customers, letting them know that while their monthly price of $15.99 will remain the same moving forward, they’ll be losing a couple of perks on or after December 5th.

There was a moment, in 2019, when streaming services were one heck of a deal. Apple TV Plus was free if you bought any kind of Apple device; you could get Disney Plus for $4 per month and lock that price in for three years; Hulu lowered its price to stay competitive; and you could share your Netflix account with as many friends, family members, roommates, and exes as you liked.

Those days are now far behind us. This year alone, all of the major names in streaming — Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, Max, Apple TV Plus, Paramount Plus, and Peacock — have raised their prices. Netflix’s most expensive plan has officially crossed the $20 threshold, and other services are steadily headed in that direction. The price of streaming is at an all-time high.

Apple is raising the prices of several of its services, including Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade, Apple News Plus, and Apple One. Apple TV Plus is going from $6.99 per month to $9.99 per month, and Apple’s other services are seeing significant hikes, too. MacRumors first spotted the changes.

Instead of $4.99 per month, Apple Arcade will now cost $6.99 per month. Meanwhile, Apple News Plus is increasing from $9.99 per month to $12.99 per month. With all three services getting price increases, that means the Apple One bundle is going up as well.