EDIT: Obviously this article was written before Paramount’s decision to allow DIRECTV subs to authenticate.
After essentially killing off the Showtime app on streaming and folding that content into Paramount+, the parent company (also called Paramount) has taken the next step and rebranded its pay TV product as “Paramount+ with Showtime.” They are promising a selection of content that was previously only available on streaming. We’ll see how much content actually migrates over and whether the newest stuff will make it there.
The weirdness
So if you’re a pay-TV subscriber, at this moment you get Paramount+ with Showtime, and you also don’t. Despite the streaming service and the pay-TV channel now having the same name, you can’t use your pay-TV credentials to log into the streaming app. That link was broken last year and I have to say I wasn’t happy about it. It only seems fair that if you’re going to call the two things with the same name you should be able to use both of them.
Will new series actually play on pay-TV, or will they be streaming only?
I have to say that I don’t have a lot of confidence here. I think Paramount really did the wrong thing in not letting pay-TV subscribers have some sort of access to the app. Maybe they still intend to and they can’t figure out how to do it. But as I said I don’t have a lot of hope.
I guess we’ll see what happens when we start to see some new content on Paramount+. That may be a while. I’ll admit that I have no handle on the Yellowstone universe, so I don’t know when they will have a new version of that. I know that Star Trek, aka the only reason I ever open the Paramount+ app, won’t be back for a few more months. Episodes of Star Trek Discovery are on pay TV, but this is a show from 2017 and arguably the weakest of the newest generation of Trek shows.
A trend or nothing to worry about?
When Netflix decided to continue charging for their 4K tier (which now costs a blistering $23 a month), I hoped that wouldn’t be the norm. It looked like Netflix was an outlier until Max decided to do the same thing, and exclude pay-TV subscribers from that tier to boot. So far no other streamer has followed suit, but I’m beginning to believe that you’ll see the trend continuing.
So it has me wondering, will other streamers rebrand (or introduce) a linear tier? Will your local network soon call itself “Peacock with NBC?” Will Jeff Bezos announce a linear version of Prime Video? At this point all bets are off. I think it would be smart to align streaming and traditional pay TV a little better, and I think that pure streamers like Prime and Netflix would benefit from getting into pay TV. Why? Because never mind all the naysayers. Pay television is bouncing back, because — and I never thought I’d be able to say this — it’s a better value than streaming.
What do you think? Will Paramount get its act together and let pay TV customers who pay for its service also stream its service? Will more streamers come to pay TV? If you’ve ever read these articles and thought I was full of “it,” now’s your time to be part of the conversation!
