Sixty-one per cent of streaming subscribers say they would cancel their favourite service if it went up by five dollars a month. That is the market you are pricing into. Most OTT pricing advice still treats the monthly figure as the central decision, but the 2025 and 2026 data points somewhere else: the plan architecture you build around that figure moves revenue considerably more than the figure itself. Here is what the benchmarks say, and how to test your way to a price that holds.

What OTT pricing covers today

Pricing for a streaming service means the full set of ways you let people pay for access, along with what each of those ways entitles them to. Four models do most of the work.

SVOD charges a recurring fee for library access. It still carries the revenue, and it is where the price pressure sits. Between 2022 and 2024 the average ad-free plan across major services went from $11 to $14, a rise of 22.8 per cent.

AVOD trades price for advertising. Over the same period the average ad-supported plan moved from $6.00 to $7.50, roughly half the ad-free price.

TVOD charges per title, usually for new releases or event content. It works as an add-on to a subscription rather than a standalone business for most platforms. Prime Video is often cited as a TVOD example, which is misleading: it is a subscription service with a transactional store attached.

Hybrid combines them, most often a cheaper ad tier alongside a premium ad-free plan, sometimes with pay-per-view on top.

The choice between these is a separate decision from the price you attach to them, and we cover the model selection in more depth in our guide to OTT monetisation strategies. This article is about what happens once the models are chosen.

The price ceiling is already here

Three data sets from the past year point the same way.

Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends survey, the twentieth edition, polled 3,575 US consumers in October and November 2025. It found that 41 per cent had cancelled a subscription in the previous six months, up from 39 per cent a year earlier. Seventy-three per cent said they were frustrated by price rises. And 61 per cent said a five-dollar monthly increase would be enough to make them drop their favourite service. Average household spend on streaming sat at $69 per month and did not grow year on year.

Growth is slowing at the same time. Omdia reported 2.24 billion online video subscriptions at the end of 2025, up 17.6 per cent, and forecasts that growth will fall to 5.6 per cent across 2026. Revenue reached $176 billion, up 13.5 per cent, so the money is still growing faster than the market can add new payers.

Antenna’s Q1’26 State of Subscriptions put premium SVOD subscriber growth at 7 per cent for 2025, down from 12 per cent in 2024, with a weighted average churn rate of 4.6 per cent.

Read together: households have stopped increasing their streaming budget, new subscribers are getting harder to find, and a small price rise carries a real cancellation risk. If your plan for the next twelve months is to raise the monthly figure, the ceiling is close enough that you should model the churn cost before you model the revenue. Our guide on how to reduce subscriber churn covers the retention side of that equation.

The ad tier is the default entry point now

Ad-supported plans stopped being the discount option and became the front door.

Antenna counted 110 million ad-supported premium SVOD subscriptions in the US by the end of Q1’26, up from around 53 million two years earlier. More telling is the share of new sign-ups: in Q1’26, ad-supported plans accounted for 70 per cent of gross additions at both Disney+ and Hulu, 55 per cent at HBO Max (up 7 points year on year) and 54 per cent at Netflix (up 5 points). Deloitte found 68 per cent of subscribers now hold at least one ad-supported tier, against 46 per cent in 2024.

For a smaller platform the practical read is this: launching a single ad-free plan means competing for the shrinking minority of viewers who still start there. An entry tier at roughly half your premium price widens the top of the funnel without touching your headline price, and it gives price-sensitive subscribers somewhere to downgrade to instead of cancelling.

What an ad tier does not do is pay for itself immediately. Ad revenue depends on fill rate and CPMs, and both depend on inventory volume that a new platform does not have. Until you reach that scale, an ad tier is a retention and acquisition instrument that runs at lower ARPU, not a second revenue line. The same logic applies further down the price curve, where FAST channels trade subscription revenue entirely for reach.

Bundles buy retention that discounts do not

The strongest retention effect in the current data comes from bundling, and it is not close.

Antenna measured the Disney+, Hulu and HBO Max bundle at a 59 per cent 12-month survival rate, 4 points above Netflix standalone and 31 points above the average of those same three services sold separately. The gap between bundled and standalone subscribers more than doubled between month one and month twelve, so the effect compounds rather than fading after the initial commitment.

The market has noticed. Bundle sign-ups across tracked services went from 4.3 million in Q1’23 to 20 million in Q4’25, a rise of 375 per cent. By February 2026, Disney+ was taking 95 per cent of its gross additions through bundled plans, and Apple TV was taking 27 per cent.

Two costs come with that. A bundle dilutes ARPU by definition, since the combined price is below the sum of the parts. More significantly, distributing through a partner or a telco means the partner owns the billing relationship, the churn signal and often the viewing data you would want for pricing decisions. For a platform whose differentiation depends on knowing its audience, that is a real trade, and worth pricing deliberately rather than accepting as the cost of distribution.

Annual plans are the most underused lever

Annual billing barely registers in streaming. Antenna found that across 41 SVOD services in Q1’24, only 4 per cent of subscriptions were on annual plans.

The lifetime value data suggests that is a miss. Antenna tracked subscribers who took Max’s discounted annual plan during a promotional window and found an average 18-month customer lifetime value of $186.71, against $122.48 for the standard monthly baseline. That is 52 per cent higher despite a deeper discount. During the House of the Dragon promotion, annual sign-ups reached 16 per cent of new subscriptions, more than five times the 3 per cent benchmark, which shows the demand exists when the offer is timed to a content moment.

The honest counterweight: annual plans pull cash forward and lock in a lower effective monthly rate, so they hurt you if your content slate improves and you would otherwise have raised prices. They also suppress the churn signal for twelve months, which means you find out about a retention problem a year late. Use them where you have a content calendar you are confident in.

What your price floor actually is

Every price sits above a cost base that scales with the audience: content licensing or production, delivery and storage, encoding, and the cost of acquiring each subscriber. The video streaming market is growing quickly, from $129.3 billion in 2024 towards a projected $416.8 billion by 2030 at a 21.5 per cent CAGR according to Grand View Research, but delivery and content costs rise alongside it.

One number deserves particular attention when you model the floor. Antenna’s data puts gross churn across major SVOD services at around 5 per cent monthly, while net churn sits under 3 per cent once returning subscribers are counted. The gap is winback. A meaningful share of your cancelled subscribers will come back on a promotion, which flatters the net figure and hides how many people are cycling in and out. If you price against net churn, you will overestimate lifetime value and overspend on acquisition.

A five-step method for setting the price

1. Start from the revenue requirement, not the competitor’s price. Set a monthly recurring revenue target, then work backwards to the subscriber count and ARPU that reach it. Decide explicitly whether the next two quarters are about volume or margin, because the two point to different tier structures.

2. Calculate lifetime value before you set the number. Take your ARPU, divide by your gross monthly churn rate, and treat that as the ceiling on what a subscriber is worth. At the category average of 4.6 per cent monthly churn, a $10 subscriber is worth roughly $217 in gross terms. If your acquisition cost is above a third of that, the price is not the problem.

3. Position against the alternatives your audience already pays for. Households are spending $69 a month in total and are not increasing it, so you are competing for a slot in an existing budget. Map where you sit against the two or three services your audience is most likely to drop in your favour, and be deliberate about whether you are the premium option or the cheaper habit.

4. Test on cohorts, not on the whole base. Run new price points and tier structures against new sign-ups in a single market first. Watch conversion rate and 30-day and 90-day retention together, because a price that lifts conversion and drops 90-day retention is a loss disguised as a win.

5. Re-run it every two quarters. Content slate, competitor pricing and ad demand all move. A pricing structure set at launch and left alone is a structure set against a market that no longer exists.

What a price change looks like on the platform

The strategy is the easy half. Execution is where most pricing plans stall, because a tier is not a number in a database. It is an entitlement rule that has to resolve consistently across web, iOS, Android and every connected TV app you ship to, at the moment a viewer presses play.

Running six monetisation models across a tenant base, as Better Media Suite does for SVOD, AVOD, TVOD, FAST, hybrid and freemium, means the entitlement layer has to be the single place where access is decided. Change a tier there and the rule applies everywhere at once, with no app release and no per-platform drift. Without that, a new tier means a submission to ten or more CTV storefronts and a wait measured in weeks, which is why so many platforms test pricing once and then stop.

Two constraints catch teams out. App store billing runs on fixed price grids, so your carefully modelled $11.49 becomes $11.99 on iOS. And raising the price for existing subscribers triggers a consent flow on both Apple and Google, which means your grandfathering policy is a product decision you make before the test, not after it.

The point of building this into the platform rather than around it is that a price experiment stops being a project. It becomes a configuration change you can run, measure and reverse inside a single billing cycle.

Pricing is the one variable you can change every quarter without commissioning a single hour of new content. Treat it as a standing experiment rather than a launch decision, and it becomes the cheapest growth lever you own. Request a demo and we will walk you through how tier configuration, entitlements and monetisation testing work on Better Media Suite.

FAQ

There is no universal figure, but the market gives you a range. Major ad-free plans average around $14 per month and ad-supported plans around $7.50. Niche and special-interest platforms often price above the ad-free average because the content has no substitute. Start from your cost base and target ARPU, then check the result against what your audience already pays.

Usually yes, as an entry point rather than a revenue line. Ad-supported plans took 54 to 70 per cent of new sign-ups at the major services in Q1’26, so an ad-free-only launch competes for a shrinking minority. Expect low ad revenue until you build inventory scale. The tier earns its place early by widening acquisition and giving price-sensitive subscribers a downgrade option.

Less often than most roadmaps assume. Deloitte found 61 per cent of subscribers would cancel their favourite service over a five-dollar monthly rise, and 73 per cent are already frustrated by increases. Model the churn cost before the revenue gain, tie any rise to a visible improvement in the offer, and consider adding a cheaper tier alongside it so people can downgrade instead of leaving.

They solve different problems. Free trials lift top-of-funnel conversion but attract subscribers who churn quickly. Discounted annual plans cost more per subscriber upfront and returned a 52 per cent higher 18-month lifetime value than standard monthly plans in Antenna’s data. If you have a content calendar you trust for the next year, the annual plan is the stronger bet.