Apple has announced another price increase for its Apple TV+ video-streaming service. Starting today, a new monthly subscription will cost $12.99; it was previously $9.99. Existing subscribers will see the new price take effect during their next billing cycle.
Annual plans and Apple TV+'s inclusion in Apple One at current pricing will remain unchanged.
The price of Apple TV+ has practically doubled since its launch a few years ago. There are many reasons for this.
When a streaming service first launches, it is usually priced lower to attract more subscribers while it builds up an audience and a library of content.
Further, the business realities for streamers have changed in the past few years. Content costs are enormous, and they've only gone up, with the cost of labor increasing following strikes and other factors. Competition has risen, so each streamer is fighting for a smaller piece of the total pie. There's also inflation, of course. And most of all, for publicly traded companies, investors have shifted from demanding more subscribers to demanding an increase in revenue due to wider market factors.
To confront all that, streamers have to turn any knobs they can to balance costs with revenue to satisfy the market. Some have turned to ads as an additional source of revenue, others crack down on password sharing or offer different subscription tiers. But virtually all of them have hiked subscription prices, because the previous price ensured short-term losses for long-term growth.
Apple TV+ does not have ads in any plan, and it hasn't broken its offering into multiple tiers. (For example, some other streaming services charge more for 4K content.) Because of that, the monthly cost is the only knob it can turn to confront these realities, passing new costs to consumers.
Despite all this, it's still very possible that even with successes like Ted Lasso, The Studio, and Severance, Apple TV+ is losing some amount of money every year. When reporting to investors each quarter, Apple bundles TV+ into a larger "services" category that includes Apple Music, the App Store, iCloud, AppleCare, and more, making it difficult for outsiders to estimate how well Apple TV+ is doing specifically.
Certainly, its shows have been critically well-received. Both Severance and The Studio in particular have gotten the streaming service positive attention. But the landscape is brutal for a relatively new entry like Apple, so expect Apple's approach to continue to evolve.
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