As it begins its second week as a bulked-up public company, Skydance has raised prices of stand-alone streaming service Discovery+.
The base-level, ad-supported tier now costs $6.99 a month, up $1, and the “ad-light” higher tier is $11.99, a $2 increase.
Skydance was formed from the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which officially closed last week. The new company is saddled with nearly $80 billion in debt and has pledged to whittle it down along with delivering $6 billion in cost savings. Along with back-end efficiencies, real estate sales and layoffs, higher streaming rates are expected, in keeping with inflation across the media sector of late.
Discovery+, which features programming from a range of cable networks, has remained a stand-alone since its launch in 2021. It initially was priced at $4.99 for the base tier and $6.99 for the plan with fewer ads, offering 50,000 hours of programming from networks like TLC, Discovery, HGTV and the Food Network.
After former parent Discovery Communications merged with WarnerMedia in 2022, the new parent looked at combining Discovery+ with HBO Max and went so far as to rebrand the latter as Max to reflect a broader content offering. Audiences and partners balked at the mixture of upmarket HBO fare with lifestyle and unscripted fare, and the corporate bosses preserved Discovery+ as a lower-priced option for consumers. In part because the company does not commission originals for Discovery+, it has been profitable for most of its existence.
HBO Max announced a round of price hikes last fall, with the basic ad-tier rising $1 to $10.99 a month and the popular Standard plan climbing to $18.49.