The plus sign was something I assumed I had left behind when I (barely) passed GCSE maths. But, lately, I’ve found myself encountering them on a daily basis. Indeed, there’s usually a handful of them littered across this newsletter, every time we cover a new series from Disney+, Apple TV+, Paramount+ or Discovery+. Streaming companies have gone wild for the plus sign suffix – or what I’ll call, for brevity’s sake, the “pluffix”.
Granted I’m not the first person to notice this trend: the New York Times was bemoaning the ubiquity of the pluffix (though they weren’t calling it that) back in 2021. But the trend refuses to die, and reached a new, higher pitch of absurdity last week when the US cable channel Showtime, which is owned by Paramount, was given the cumbersome new name of Paramount+ With Showtime. Equally baffling was the decision to rename Starzplay – a title that felt memorable in an endearingly naff way – as the dreary Lionsgate+, in the process replacing one streamer that most viewers will have barely heard of with … another streamer that most viewers will have barely heard of.
