Paramount+ will get a bit more expensive later this year as it folds in Showtime's streaming service. The Premium tier of Paramount+, which will be renamed to Paramount+ With Showtime, will soon cost $12 per month, up from the current $10, as Variety reports. The ad-supported tier, which will not include Showtime, is going up from $5 to $6 per month.
Paramount Global will increase the prices when it merges the two services, which is expected to happen early in the third quarter of this year (i.e., around July or August). The price hikes will be effective in the US and some other markets, according to The Verge. They'll be the first price increases since CBS All Access became Paramount+ two years ago.
There are now almost 56 million Paramount+ subscribers. The service added 9.9 million members in the last quarter of 2022, with the likes of NFL games, Yellowstone and Top Gun: Maverick drawing new users in. Revenue also increased by 81 percent compared with the same quarter in 2021 to around $800 million. As for the ad-supported Pluto TV service, the number of global monthly active users increased by 6.5 million to just under 79 million.
However, Paramount Global executives warned investors on an earnings call the company ran into significant "headwinds" in 2022 and that this won't be a "robust year" for profits. CEO Bob Bakish said that ,for Paramount+, "we are at peak investment in 2023."
Paramount Global expects to take a writedown of between $1.3 billion and $1.5 billion as an impairment charge as it merges Paramount+ and Showtime in the US. The writedown, according to chief financial officer Naveen Chopra, is "all about content, driven by the fact that when we combine Showtime and Paramount+, we don’t need the kind of content you would need if they were operating on an independent basis." The company hopes that the move will save it as much as $700 million.
