Monthly price 🇺🇸: $8.99 (Essential with ads), $13.99 (Premium without ads)
Monthly price 🇬🇧: £4.99 (Basic with ads), £7.99 (Standard without ads), £10.99 (Premium without ads, 4K, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos)
Free trial?: 7 day free tial
We’re firmly living in the Streaming Age now – and, truth be told, it’s a little more like the olden days of TV packages and straight-up cable. With so many different competing platforms, each with their own libraries of TV and cinema to scrutinise, it’s a toughie to hitch your post to a particular service. That's why we've covered a guide to the best TV and film streaming services to help you make a choice between them.
Under the microscope here is Paramount+: a streamer on the cheaper side, and with some excellent IPs to its name, but a lack of music content lets it down.
Prices and tiers
In the US, there are only two Paramount+ tiers available– an ad-full, HD-only Essential plan, for $8.99 per month or $89.99 per year, and a similar ad-free Premium (with 4K, Atmos and four devices) for $13.99 per month or $139.99 per year. When other streamers are asking upwards of $18/£15 per month for advanced tiers, these prices aren’t bad at all.
In the UK, from where I’m reviewing Paramount+, there are three tiers – Basic, Standard and Premium. Basic (£4.99 a month/£43.99 a year) is your run-of-the-mill, ad-filled and barely-HD viewing experience; Standard (£7.99 a month / £70.99 a year) is ad-free, with the capability to stream on two devices at once; and Premium (£10.99 / £97.99 a year) offers 4K, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos viewing on up to four devices. I’m reviewing the Premium tier.
Content
Paramount+ is the home for six key media brands besides itself: Showtime, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr., MTV, and Smithsonian. You can search for shows this way, as if switching channels, or you can explore sections by genre, mood or aspirational sentence.
There’s a range of standard accessibility features available, including subtitles, closed captions and audio descriptions. These are easy to access on app versions of the platform, but sometimes bug out of appearing in browser; a shame!
It’s hard to ignore an open goal Paramount+ has missed, with respect to one particular brand: MTV. There’s a treasure-trove of music-related programming in those archives, barely any of which gets to shine on Paramount+. Case firmly in point: why on earth, with the MTV brand in the palm of your hand, would you only offer one MTV Unplugged to watch – and why is it Eric Clapton?
Ultimately this is MTV’s failing, of course, being a now-defunct channel that resolved to show the worst of the worst reality television in its retirement years. There are, at least, some music-documentarian gems here, but you have to wade through row after row of the insufferable and insipid first – before you get to the bottom of the page, where they’re all helpfully bundled into a category entitled “Documentaries and Specials”.
Here, I found the oddly-charming half-gem of a series, Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bassists Human Too?; a lightweight and somewhat self-aggrandizing combination of travel show, artist biography and food tourism segment, wherein That Guy From Rush™ hangs out with famous rock bassists on their days off. Watch on as he operates Les Claypool’s personal excavator, and attends a gig played by Robert Trujillo’s teenage son; listen, as his calm voiceover narrates such scenes, providing historical context to artist and location alike.
There’s also, of course, Ozzy: No Escape From Now, the documentary that chronicles the final weeks before Ozzy Osbourne’s last ever gig – and, ultimately, the final weeks of his life. It’s a moving, touching, sometimes difficult-to-watch portrait of a swan song in motion, and a credit to the platform.
At the time of review, Paramount’s selection of originals and exclusives is quite strong; among the many semi-forgettable, there’s Landman, Taylor Sheridan’s darling successor to Yellowstone and the launching of a thousand TikTok clips. You may also get a kick out of MobLand, a similarly ersatz-reverent, Guy Ritchie-produced slice of British criminal-underworld goodness starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren at their typecast best.
For existing IPs, Paramount+ makes a big deal of its dominion over Star Trek, and of the myriad spin-offs it’s commissioned in recent years. Not being much of a Trekkie household, my wife and I instead got a great kick out of revisiting Comedy Central’s South Park, among other adult-animation classics like Beavis and Butthead and Daria. We were also buoyed by the general excellence of the Nickelodeon section.
We were also pleasantly surprised to find the original two seasons of Twin Peaks on the platform; an inarguably oblique bit of programming, a world apart from NCIS: Tony and Ziva and the Sexy Beast TV spinoff I spotted it nestled between.
User experience
I did most of my Paramount+ reviewing (read: couch-potatoing with some favoured television) using the PlayStation 5's Paramount+ app, which was a smooth enough experience. I found the search bar a little slow, and not quite as smart as Netflix’s – but still smarter than other platforms I’ve tried.
As for streaming, media sometimes took a little time to resolve from a compressed, blocky mess – but never long enough to beat the studio logos at the start of a given film. The 4K experience is otherwise excellent in-app; it’s a shame it doesn’t translate to browser.
Anti-piracy measures mean that pretty much every streaming service is a little worse in-browser than via a dedicated app, and Paramount+ is no different. There’s an unfocused lossiness to the stream that feels more like watching a 780p YouTube video than a premium-tier service.
The alternatives
Here's a good place to mention that Paramount+ can also be accessed via Amazon Prime Video, as an add-on bundle. I find the Amazon Prime Video app and browser slightly more stable to navigate, but there’s a caveat in the form of less available content and features. It's also a platform positively crammed with music content, classic movies, TV series and family fabvourites.
For a different flavour entirely, the nearest competitor to Paramount+ would be Disney+; you trade Star Trek for Star Wars, Showtime for STARZ and Nickelodeon for, well, Disney! Music content here isn't exactly overwhelming, but there's definitely enough to keep you occupied - especially if you're a fan of The Beatles.
If you’re after a broader catalogue of media, music media included, it’s hard not to talk about Netflix. It’s the most expensive of the mainstream streamers going, but it’s unparalleled for breadth of content.
