Sky joins streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus in raising its prices
Yet more price hikes
Sky has announced that it is planning to raise the monthly pricing of several of its TV packages from April 1, 2024, with some add-ons set to cost up to £3 extra a month. In an email sent to customers on Friday, March 8, Sky informed subscribers that several of its TV packages, including add-ons, would be subject to monthly price increases.
The affected packages and subscriptions – including Sky Ultimate TV, which is Sky’s basic streaming entertainment package with Netflix – are listed below, alongside the monthly increase:
- Sky Ultimate TV + £2.00
- Sky Kids + £1.00
- Sky Sports + £3.00
- Whole Home + £1.00
- Sky Cinema + £3.00
This comes at a time when many of the best streaming services are raising their prices or introducing ad-tier plans for the same price of what was a basic ad-free plan. Recently, it was suggested that we could see another price hike from Netflix this year and that you now have to pay extra to stream Prime Video without ads. Disney Plus also raised its prices from £7.99 to £10.99 in the UK for its 4K compatible plan.
Costly for some
Although it doesn’t seem like Sky’s price hike is too much more than other recent changes to rival services, some Sky users will have all of these packages, meaning they’ll be paying an extra £10 a month or £120 a year. If you’re signed up for the whole suite of Sky services, including all the above subscriptions, then it would cost you £78 a month or £936 a year.
Admittedly, there may not be that many signed up to the complete Sky package , but for an already pricey subscription service, adding up to an extra £10 a month to your bills if you have all these services is costly. That’s not even including the UHD and Dolby Atmos add-ons, which allow you to watch in 4K – these cost an extra £6 a month.
With over 23 million subscribers in six countries (it’s unclear how many are UK based), the price rise could land Sky some serious money. It’s worth noting that in the email sent to customers, it noted that Sports subscribers can expect over 8,000 extra hours of content this year, including more football, tennis, rugby matches, for example, so the extra investment may be worth it. But, for some Sky TV customers, it’s still a very tough pill to swallow.
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James is the TV Hardware Staff Writer at TechRadar. Before joining the team, he worked at a major UK based AV retailer selling TV and audio equipment, where he was either telling customers the difference between OLED and QLED or being wowed by watching a PS5 run on the LG 65G2. When not writing about the latest TV tech, James can be found gaming, reading, watching rugby or coming up with another idea for a novel.