AT&T raises another streaming service’s prices
One week after AT&T raised prices and cut channels from DirecTV Now, AT&T-owned Crunchyroll has announced its own price hike. The anime streaming service’s ad-free plan now costs $8 per month (or $80 per year) for new subscribers, up from $7 per month (or $70 per year) previously. Current monthly subscribers will pay the higher price after three more months, and yearly subscribers will be grandfathered for another year, TechCrunch reports. Crunchyroll will continue to offer an ad-supported plan with a more limited content selection.
In a statement to TechCrunch, Crunchyroll said the price hike is due to “rising costs of content and infrastructure,” and will allow the service, which claims to offer 90% of the world’s anime, to provide even more. The service has 2 million paid subscribers and 12 million monthly active users.
Still, this isn’t a great look for AT&T, which just announced $10 per month price hikes for current DirecTV Now subscribers, alongside new plans that offer fewer channels at higher prices than the plans they’re replacing. When AT&T was trying to get its Time Warner acquisition approved in court last year, the company had promised that it would lower prices instead.
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