Discovery+ Gets More Expensive a Week After the Skydance Takeover
Discovery+ now costs $7 per month with advertising and $12 per month without advertising for new members, under pricing that took effect Tuesday, Oct. 13. The ad-supported tier rose by $1. The ad-free tier rose by $2. Engadget
Existing subscribers do not change over immediately. They will move to the new rates with their first bill on or after Nov. 12, after 30 days notice. The structure preserves a short grandfathering window, a standard mechanism for subscription billing changes.
The adjustment follows a January 2025 increase that took the ad-supported plan to $5.99 per month from $4.99 and the ad-free plan to $9.99 per month from $8.99. Reuters An earlier reference point dates to January 2023, when Warner Bros. Discovery raised the HBO Max ad-free subscription by $1 to $15.99 plus taxes per month for U.S. subscribers. Reuters
The timing places the price change one week after Paramount Skydance completed its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, a closing reported on Oct. 6. CBS News That acquisition followed approval by the FCC of the $8 billion merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media. LiveNOW Fox Before the deal closed, Warner Bros. Discovery had been considering an outright sale following unsolicited interest. It had also sought to reach $1 billion in earnings from its Max and Discovery+ streaming services. Reuters
Skydance has signaled its intention to combine Paramount+ and HBO Max into a single streaming service. That plan was described as an intention, not as a completed product change.
Looking at what this means for subscribers and for the combined portfolio, the near term mechanics are simple to describe. Discovery+ remains available as a standalone, but its price now sits closer to larger, broader catalog services. For households that subscribed primarily for unscripted libraries, the calculation shifts. Pay more to stay where they are, or reassess a bundle that includes scripted series, films and live properties. In this author's view, operators often use this kind of differential to steer that choice without forcing it.
Worth flagging is the operational side, which matters more than the dollar amounts. A 30 day notice period and a Nov. 12 transition for existing billing avoids a hard cutover. It gives support teams, payment retry systems, app store entitlements and customer communications time to align. Churn tends to arrive in two waves in these cases, first from headlines and then from the actual higher charge. The second wave is the one finance teams watch.
The broader context here is consolidation economics, not content cost alone. Maintaining parallel apps, parallel encoding ladders, parallel rights management and parallel recommendation stacks is expensive. A single flagship service reduces duplication. A higher priced standalone reduces the penalty for maintaining the smaller service in the interim, while increasing average revenue per user from customers who choose to stay. Over the long arc, streaming has followed the same path as PCs, mobile data and cloud storage. Early low pricing builds habit, then pricing rationalizes as platforms mature. That does not make increases welcome, but it makes them predictable.
