- Apple is raising the price of a subscription to its streaming platform Apple TV+.
- The increase comes a week after Netflix announced its own price hikes.
- Streaming giants are seeking profitability — not just subscriber growth.
Your Apple TV+ subscription is going up — again.
Apple is raising the price of a monthly subscription to its streaming platform Apple TV+, the home of “Ted Lasso” and “The Morning Show. A monthly subscription will now cost $9.99, a $3 hike from its former $6.99 price tag and a $5 hike from the $4.99 it cost just over a year ago.
Apple also said it will be raising the prices of AppleNews+, Apple Arcade, and its bundle Apple One. The increases were first spotted by Mac Rumors, and they’re already visible on each respective website and the App Store.
It’s not the only streaming platform that’s upping its subscription price. Last week, Netflix announced it would increase the price of its lowest-tier ad-free plan from $9.99 to $11.99 and of its premium plan from $19.99 to $22.99.
In August, Disney hiked the prices of both Disney+ and Hulu after CEO Bob Iger admitted the company had initially underpriced its streaming platforms. Hulu’s ad-free tier went from $14.99 per month to $17.99, and a monthly subscription to Disney+’s ad-free tier increased from $10.99 to $13.99.
“We have to better rationalize our costs,” Iger said in March, The Wall Street Journal reported. “Obviously we have to attract more subs, but I think one of the key things we have to figure out is a pricing strategy that makes sense.”
Streaming platforms, which long sought subscriber growth over any other metric, are now looking to achieve profitability — and in their quest to right their balance sheets, they are testing the waters to see how much users will pay to have access to their favorite shows.
As Insider’s Matt Turner put it, “the great streaming giveaway is over.”
“For a decade in streaming, an enormously valuable amount of quality content has been given away well below fair market value, and I think that’s in the process of being corrected,” Gunnar Wiedenfels, the Warner Bros. Discovery CFO, said in September. “We’ve seen price increases across essentially the entire competitive set.”
Before HBO Max and Discovery+ merged to become Max in May, HBO Max raised its ad-free subscription price one dollar to $15.99.
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