Price Chart for Leading Subscription Video Streaming Services: Updated With New Max Prices
The steady SVOD price creep of recent years has, it seems, entered a new content-centric phase.
With Peacock set to hike its rates in mid-July — just ahead of the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremonies — Max on Tuesday implemented its own surprise price increase, mere days before the June 16 season premiere of HBO’s blockbuster series “House of the Dragon.”
It’s a signifier of just how much the streaming business has changed in the past two years. The week before the show’s first season premiere in 2022 (and amid the company’s Great Content Purge), HBO/Max parent Warner Bros. Discovery actually slashed the price of annual subscriptions to its SVOD by 30% for new users.
The intention then was clearly to entice new subscribers coming for “Dragon” to lock into yearly plans, thereby reducing the number of fans who would churn out following the season finale.
Unless David Zaslav & Co. have a similar discount up their sleeves set to launch in the next two weeks, the strategy this time around seems to be rather different. Now, WBD appears intent on simply collecting as much revenue as possible from any users who sign up to catch “House of the Dragon” rather than trying to persuade them to remain in the Max ecosystem.
It’s possible to conclude from this that the annual pricing strategy didn’t work; the fact that WBD has lost almost a million domestic streaming subscribers since Q3 2022, when “Dragon” premiered, would seem to support this.
But one should also conclude that, even as media companies trim their content spending, the credo of “content is king” remains as strong as ever and is dictating pricing strategies even more forcefully.
