Breaking: discovery+ Raises Price of Ad-Free Subscription
Effective immediately, ad-free discovery+ is rising in price from $6.99 per month to $8.99.
There must be something in the air this week. Almost immediately after news broke that Netflix was planning to raise prices for customers in the coming months, discovery+ announced that, effective immediately, it was increasing the cost of its ad-free plan from $6.99 per month to $8.99.
This is the first price increase from discovery+ since 2021. Users who are not billed before then will see the change take place after Nov. 2, but new customers will see the price change reflected immediately. The service is not raising the cost of its ad-supported plan, which will remain at $4.99 per month.
“This [price increase] will allow us to continue to provide can’t miss-stories in the food, home, relationships, true crime, paranormal genres - plus so much more,” discovery+ said in a letter to its subscribers informing them of the change.
At this point, all discovery+ is doing is following an industry trend when it comes to raising prices on ad-free streaming. The cost of streaming plans without ads has risen 25% in the past year, and a bundle of the top four or five ad-free streaming platforms is now on par with that of a cable subscription cost-wise.
Streaming services are no longer seeing their company’s stock price surge when they announce a new batch of subscribers, and have been tasked with showing profitability if they want Wall Street investors to back them. Ad-free streaming tiers actually bring in less money per customer than ad-supported plans, which is why streaming platforms have to price them so much higher. Disney is preparing to unleash a new wave of price hikes on ad-free plans of Disney+ and Hulu on Oct. 12.
Users would be wise to expect a similar price increase for Warner Bros. Discovery’s other streaming platform Max. That service has added or announced the addition of both live news and live sports in the past month, and company CEO David Zaslav said users could expect increases in the near future in mid September.
“We think that there’s meaningful opportunity as we add quality content to Max and as we launch it around the world to move on price,” Zaslav said. “We think that the value that we’re creating and the amount of value we’re creating that we can get more price. When we have risen price, we haven’t found any — we found that the loss to us has been very minimal.”
The price increase on Max could come without warning, just as the discovery+ rate hike did. The Streamable will have you covered if it does, but it’s reasonable to assume that if your favorite ad-free streaming service hasn’t announced or executed a price escalation in the past 6-12 months, such an increase is imminent.
discovery+
discovery+ is a video streaming service that offers more than 70,000 episodes of 2,500+ current and classic shows from several popular TV brands including Discovery, Investigation Discovery, HGTV, TLC, Food Network, A&E, Lifetime, and History.