Peacock wants you to get the with commercials Subscription, as does Hulu and Paramount, that is why they all discount them so much, because they make more revenue.
Yep, Peacock has been a disaster compared to Paramount+, who has more then Triple the paying subscribers that Peacock has.
I was going to drop them until they (Fox, Paramount also) signed the Big Ten deal, now I might just do the monthly thing during Football Season.
Yeah, all of these services really prefer that you get the cheaper version with ads. You can see how DTC streaming is, in a way, simply recreating the old basic cable bundle, except instead of one big bundle it's split between each individual company. I'm a little surprised that they don't charge more for the ad-free version so that it's a totally revenue-neutral decision vs. the cheaper tier. My guess is that they're simply constrained by the pricing for Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+ (and to a lesser extent, perhaps, Apple TV+), which have always only been ad-free. Although Netflix and Disney+ are both supposed to roll out their cheaper plan(s) with ads before year-end. I do expect that, in time, the delta between ad and ad-free plans will increase and that most US subs will opt for the cheaper plans with ads.
Paramount+ has been around for 8 years now, originally launching as CBS All Access in Oct. 2014. So it's not quite fair to compare its sub numbers against Peacock, which launched just over two years ago in July 2020. NBCU is getting more serious about touting it this fall, now that NBC and Bravo next-day shows (and lots of entire series) have left Hulu to be exclusively on Peacock. I notice that all ads on NBC for their shows now prominently advertise Peacock (as ABC has been doing with Hulu for awhile). They're throwing a lot of live sports into Peacock, plus it's getting all the recent Universal theatrical movies (Belfast was the final one to go to HBO), with a few day-and-date movies here and there like the upcoming Halloween Ends. So its numbers should go up.
Most likely endgame, as recent rumors have said, is that NBCU and WBD merge in a few years ('24 or '25), producing a global SVOD that offers pretty much all of what HBO Max and Peacock Premium (and maybe Discovery+) have now. While the app would probably use the Peacock codebase, I don't think it would be branded that. Probably just call it Universal or Universal+. But after having sunk a few years' worth of ad dollars in building awareness for the Peacock name, and getting millions to use it, it would be a shame to waste that. So my guess is that Peacock would lose its Premium tier (which would be part of the Universal SVOD) and become a pure FAST. Whatever content will be in the upcoming WBD FAST (which might launch in the US by the end of '23) would just get folded into it.
As for Paramount+, I still think it exits the global SVOD market in a few years. If Universal and Warner merge (likely leaving Paramount with no viable acquirer), that could be the final straw that causes Paramount shareholders to revolt against the ongoing losses at P+, which the company doesn't think *might* be profitable for a few more years. Better to just license their content out to the big boys and immediately make a profit on it rather than keep burning cash on a service that will never really be able to compete with much larger companies.
But I do think Paramount might still sell some kind of "CBS+" DTC service in the US, essentially just packaging up live streams of CBS and their various basic cable nets (Nick, MTV, etc.) with their recent on-demand libraries, i.e. a way to buy just their part of the cable bundle.
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