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.
So what’s with this relentless pluffixing? Well, if one were being generous, sticking an addition sign on the end of your company might be considered a neat, unfussy way of signifying something more; in this case a bountiful array of content worth paying a little extra for. Less charitably, there’s probably a lot of corporate copycatting going on here, with streamers adopting the little cross at the end of their name simply because other streamers – Disney, notably – had already done so and enjoyed some success. The pluffix has become – like the habit of putting an ‘i’ or an ‘e’ before a noun (iPod, eHarmony etc) – the lazy brand name du jour.
The problem, of course, is that, when so many companies are reaching for the plus sign, its power gets diluted. All those plus-ridden streaming services might start to seem interchangeable to consumers, and perhaps in the process less essential, especially at a time when we’re all looking to trim a few subscriptions from our monthly bills. Moreover, there’s a blandness to this sea of pluffixes that feels at odds with the air of high-quality those streamers are looking to tap into. The name “Paramount” evokes old Hollywood glamour (the world’s fifth oldest film studio, creators of Sunset Boulevard, Psycho and The Godfather); ‘Paramount+’, on the other hand, sounds like a credit card that you keep receiving letters about despite having never signed up.
Strangely, British streamers have proved immune to the pluffix epidemic. Instead we have a pleasingly eccentric collection of titles that, for my money, are a lot more memorable than their US counterparts. BBC iPlayer, launched 15 years ago, is old enough to have been swept up in that earlier “i” naming trend, which made it seem like a lazy Apple mimicker at the time, but now feels oddly distinctive. There’s also the cheerfully alliterative BritBox, the urgently titled Now, Channel 5’s My5 (renamed from the worryingly aggressive Demand5), and Channel 4’s punning All 4. The only British streamer that comes close to adopting the addition sign is ITV’s newly launched ITVX; which essentially has just tipped the + on its side.
Not every non-UK streamer has succumbed to the pluffix, either. With HBO Max, Warner Bros has seemingly opted for the language of a totally rad skateboarding character from a bad 90s kids TV show instead. Amazon continue to do their own thing with the unwieldy Amazon Prime Video. And Peacock, NBC’s streaming service, has riffed on the veteran US network’s peacock logo. Peacock is perhaps the best name of any streamer, nodding to NBC’s heritage while also hinting at a plethora of colourful shows. It’s also so far been a bit of a flop, suggesting a classy name alone won’t bring in the eyeballs.
For more evidence of that, look to the biggest streaming service of them all. Netflix is a terrible name. It sounds extremely dated, a holdover from the web 1.0 era, when shortening ‘internet’ to ‘net’ wasn’t an extremely cringeworthy thing to do. (In fairness Netflix is a holdover from the web 1.0 era: the company was founded in 1997.) Yet in spite of that backwards looking name, Netflix has completely revolutionised an entire industry – and all without a pluffix in sight.
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