Adverts on Paramount +

[Mark39]

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@Barrowboy63 wrote:

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Deflection, and missing the point completely. Sky have broken their agreement  with its customers plain and simple. 

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If you can find the part of Sky's terms and conditions which they've breached you might have a point.

[Barrowboy63]

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@Mark39 wrote:

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@Barrowboy63 wrote:

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Deflection, and missing the point completely. Sky have broken their agreement  with its customers plain and simple. 

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If you can find the part of Sky's terms and conditions which they've breached you might have a point.

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As I've said before, is what they've done legal? Probably. Is it right? In my opinion, no. And nothing will change that opinion. In my opinion it's a sharp business practice that undermines my trust in Sky. It's something that I and many others will remember come renewal time. 

[Laing1]

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@Barrowboy63 wrote:

@Annie+UK You can't unless you create a new Paramount account which can't because your email address is bound to Sky. 

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@Barrowboy63 if thats all thats stopping you then create a new e-mail address 

[MarkGoldsmith]

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@Barrowboy63 wrote:

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@Mark39 wrote:

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@Barrowboy63 wrote:

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Deflection, and missing the point completely. Sky have broken their agreement  with its customers plain and simple. 

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If you can find the part of Sky's terms and conditions which they've breached you might have a point.

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As I've said before, is what they've done legal? Probably. Is it right? In my opinion, no. And nothing will change that opinion. In my opinion it's a sharp business practice that undermines my trust in Sky. It's something that I and many others will remember come renewal time. 

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Out of curiosity, what do you expect Sky to do when Paramount are the ones who have pulled the old tiers on their subscription service and replaced them with ad supported tiers or more expensive premium tiers? Paramount, as a business, would be highly unlikely to want to allow premium access to Sky Cinema customers unless they got a higher chunk of money from Sky ( as that would just be bad business from the Paramount side). So perhaps the other alternative would have been Sky having to agree a higher financial agreement with Paramount and then significantly raise the price of Sky Cinema as a result.

[Barrowboy63]

@Laing1 ... create a new email address. And effectively pay twice for a subscription my contract with sky included before they downgraded it. 

[Annie+UK]

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@Barrowboy63 wrote:

@Laing1 ... create a new email address. And effectively pay twice for a subscription my contract with sky included before they downgraded it. 

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Paramount changed their plans on their service

[Barrowboy63]

@MarkGoldsmith When I looked at Paramount's web page on Friday, the option of a Standard Ad Free tier cost £7.99 was still available. Ideally, I would have liked Sky to at least tell us about the change before it actually happened, explain why it was happening and perhaps have an upgrade path availble for those who might have wanted to keep an ad free service.  

But between them, Sky and Paramount have let their customers down. 

[Barrowboy63]

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@Annie+UK wrote:

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@Barrowboy63 wrote:

@Laing1 ... create a new email address. And effectively pay twice for a subscription my contract with sky included before they downgraded it. 

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Paramount changed their plans on their service

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Paramount still offer the standard tier. I've just looked. 

[SKY1992bf]

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@MarkGoldsmith wrote:

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@Barrowboy63 wrote:

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@Mark39 wrote:

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@Barrowboy63 wrote:

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Deflection, and missing the point completely. Sky have broken their agreement  with its customers plain and simple. 

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If you can find the part of Sky's terms and conditions which they've breached you might have a point.

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As I've said before, is what they've done legal? Probably. Is it right? In my opinion, no. And nothing will change that opinion. In my opinion it's a sharp business practice that undermines my trust in Sky. It's something that I and many others will remember come renewal time. 

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Out of curiosity, what do you expect Sky to do when Paramount are the ones who have pulled the old tiers on their subscription service and replaced them with ad supported tiers or more expensive premium tiers? Paramount, as a business, would be highly unlikely to want to allow premium access to Sky Cinema customers unless they got a higher chunk of money from Sky ( as that would just be bad business from the Paramount side). So perhaps the other alternative would have been Sky having to agree a higher financial agreement with Paramount and then significantly raise the price of Sky Cinema as a result.

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@MarkGoldsmith totally agree,

sky are not solely at fault here paramount has played a significant role in this decision themselves 

whilst customers may have a contract with sky they also have a contract with any service provider they access through the sky platform even though they aren't paying the service provider direct 

I wonder how many customers within this thread have also complained to paramount themselves, I suspect not many 

[Barrowboy63]

@SKY1992bf 

How many have complained to Paramount? I have. Twice. And they refer me to Sky.

[Widescreen]

I continued my Sky Cinema subscription on the basis of the added benefit of Paramount without ads last time around. I won't be doing so again. Sharp practice and terrible customer service. 

[MarkGoldsmith]

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@Barrowboy63 wrote:

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@Annie+UK wrote:

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@Barrowboy63 wrote:

@Laing1 ... create a new email address. And effectively pay twice for a subscription my contract with sky included before they downgraded it. 

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Paramount changed their plans on their service

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Paramount still offer the standard tier. I've just looked. 

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Unless i'm very much mistaken, prior to these changes by Paramount in November, they only had the single tier, and have now brought in 3 tiers. Whilst the standard tier is identical to their old package, its more expensive so therefore financial and business reasons would likely dictate that Paramount wouldn't want to offer a now more expensive tier for the same financial agreement they had with Sky.

People shouldn't forget that the exact same thing happened when Netflix changed their tiers and added a cheaper ad-supported tier, which is what became the included tier as part of the Sky package, again almost certainly for financial reasons.

Unfortunately we can't have it both ways, if third party services that are included in a Sky package have their tiers changed and the pricing updated to match then either we are going to have to accept only getting the basic tiers included or not complaint if Sky hike prices more to cover the additional money they would have to provide to the likes of Paramount and Netflix to have customers on the higher tiers.

Unless i'm very much mistaken most deals like this, where a service provider offers "free" access to a third party streaming service, that service is typically the most basic of the tiers. I have accounts with a couple of streaming services which I get for "free" as part of taking a service from a service provider and they are all on the basic with ads tiers ( some of which don't allow the option to upgrade to a more expensive tier ).

[MarkGoldsmith]

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@Barrowboy63 wrote:

@MarkGoldsmith When I looked at Paramount's web page on Friday, the option of a Standard Ad Free tier cost £7.99 was still available. Ideally, I would have liked Sky to at least tell us about the change before it actually happened, explain why it was happening and perhaps have an upgrade path availble for those who might have wanted to keep an ad free service.  

But between them, Sky and Paramount have let their customers down. 

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I'm not denying that the comms couldn't have been dramatically improved. Thats seemingly quite a common things with regards to changes related to Sky packages, the comms aren't always that great.

Equally Paramount could have taken it on themselves to notify customers of the changes as they will know exactly which accounts are "provided by Sky". In fact I would have thought it would have been more in Paramount's interest to do so, as they could have used it as a opportunity to directly sell the Standard or Premium teirs to these affected Sky customers (perhaps with a nice tempting first year discount). 

Who knows in the future, perhaps there will be an upgrade path available for Sky Cinema customers. Personally i have a feeling that Paramount + kind of rushed the implementation of ad supported tiers into their model and they did so because they were amongst the last of their competitors to offer this and were seeing the positive results that others were getting from the ad model. With such a rushed change there would be things like technical third party integrations and commercial agreements that they simply wouldn't have had time to complete and update with regards to the new tiering structure.

[TimmyBGood]

In plain terms, Paramount, under Bakish, who ran the company from late 2016 to this April, made the ill-fated decision to go for broke on streaming — right at the moment when traditional TV advertising and cable TV affiliate revenue took a turn for the worse. The erosion of those two key profit centers for Paramount (and other media giants) was sharper and swifter than most analysts predicted. Paramount+’s expansion was financed in large part with debt — which also became more expensive to manage over the past two years as interest rates climbed. All of these headwinds have left Paramount in a vulnerable state.

Paramount+ has been the company’s financial Achilles’ heel. The streamer has chewed through money and other resources since it was relaunched and expanded at the height of the streaming wars in March 2021. As Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney and others have learned, it costs a fortune to feed a hungry streaming service. Not only does it require billions of dollars to invest in original productions, but it takes millions to market those titles, and still more millions for the technology and computing bandwidth to power those platforms.

https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/paramount-failed-merger-talks-1236040673/ 

[Widescreen]

@MarkGoldsmith The point you're missing is that Paramount+ is included as part of an existing premium offering from Sky - i.e. Sky Cinema. This is by no means 'free' but is very much degraded offering these days because so many movies are now only available on streaming platforms. The Paramount bundle was therefore a way of briding that gap to some extent and continuing to just the very high cost of Sky Cinema. The fact that the added benefit is now very much less attractive because of the ads means that the inflated cost of Sky Cinema is now back in the spotlight. That, plus the complete lack of communication from Sky despite the original fanfare launch is why people are upset.