Now Discovery Has a Subscription Service Because Everyone is Doing It
- Paul Thurrott
- Jan 04, 2021
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You can add Discovery+ to the long and growing list of video streaming services that you can now pay for each and every month. But aren’t we already suffering from subscription service fatigue?
“As we go live with Discovery+ today in the U.S., we are thrilled to be working with best-in-class partners to make it available everywhere our fans are,” Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav said in a prepared statement. “Our ambition is simple: Bring consumers the definitive and most complete destination for real-life entertainment at a price point that makes this the perfect companion for every household’s streaming and TV portfolio. There is nothing like it in the market today. We launch with significant advantages, including the world’s greatest collection of non-fiction brands and content, built over more than 30 years across popular and enduring verticals, as well as powerful partnerships with leading distributors and platforms.”
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For those unfamiliar, Discovery owns a family of networks that includes such popular options as Animal Planet, Food Network, HGTV, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, and several others. Discovery+ is a subscription service that lets you stream over 55,000 episodes of current and classic shows from those networks, plus non-fiction content from A&E, the BBC, The History Channel, and Lifetime. The service also provides over 50 original titles and over 150 hours of exclusive content at launch, with a promised 1,000 hours of original content in its first year.
Discovery+ costs $4.99 per month, or $6.99 per month for an ad-free experience. It is available on Amazon Fire TV (and will be coming to Amazon Prime Channels later), Apple i-devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch) and Apple TV, Google living room devices (Chromecast with Google TV, Android TV), Android, Microsoft Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, Roku, and 2017 and newer Samsung smart TVs.
Discovery+ will be available outside the United States soon, too, and the service had partnered with Vodafone to make it available to existing Vodafone TV and mobile customers in 12 markets across Europe, including the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Turkey, and the UK.