Are you a DIRECTV NOW customer? This morning AT&T started to notify customers of a $10 price hike. Not only that but add-ons like HBO are going up also. Now if you want HBO on the old grandfathered plans it will cost you $15 a month. Cinemax, Showtime, and STARZ also cost $11 a month. You can find all of this by going into the settings on DIRECTV NOW and looking at your current package and add-ons.
Update: AT&T Just Posted This Price Hike Notice On Their Site:
- Base packages – The prices of the Live a Little, Just Right, Go Big, Gotta Have It, and Todo y Mas packages are increasing by $10 a month.
- Premium channels – Prices starting March 13, 2019 will be $15 per month for HBO® and $11 per month for Cinemax®and Starz®.
- International options – The Brazilian package is increasing to $30 per month and the Deportes add-on is increasing to $15 a month.
- We want to make sure you still have an exclusive deal on your Go Big Package and receive the best streaming value around with access to over 100 channels. You’ll continue to save $25 per month off the regular price of Go Big, but your package will increase $10 per month, the same amount as all packages.
Good to know: Already have a premium channel, international option, or Deportes? You’ll keep your current price.
From that notice, it looks like all customers will see a $10 price hike but if you already have HBO, for example, you can keep it at $5 a month.
Update #2: Here is the email DIRECTV NOW is sending grandfathered subscribers:
Starting today, DIRECTV NOW℠ is offering new packages, PLUS and MAX. Each package has a different channel lineup than what you currently have, and both include HBO®.
Go Big is yours to hang on to, even though it’s not available to new customers. However, because programming costs continue to rise, your package will be increasing $10/mo beginning 05/07/2019. As a long-time streamer and early-adopter of DIRECTV NOW, you have an exclusive deal on your Go Big package and continue to save $25/mo on access to over 100 channels.
Not all customers have been notified. Notifications seem to be rolling out 25 days before their price hike so look for more notifications of a price hike roll out in the next few weeks.
This comes as AT&T is rolling out new DIRECTV NOW packages. The new packages will cost $50 a month for the DIRECTV NOW Plus with 40+ channels and $70 a month for DIRECTV NOW MAX with 50+ channels. DIRECTV NOW has also added HBO to the Plus and MAX packages as a standard channel.
Overnight Reddit’s DIRECTV NOW subReddit exploded in anger as the notifications of DIRECTV NOW’s price changed started to roll out. Many are upset as it looks like discounts they have had are no longer available.
This price hike and end of promotional offers are well in line with what AT&T’s CEO said this morning. “Where we were giving DIRECTV NOW for $10 or $15 a month and moving away from those as we mentioned, we had about 0.5 million of those at the end of June last year, by the end of the year we were essentially – didn’t have any of those last.”
The AT&T CEO went on to say “We moved through that, we took the pricing on DTV Now up to market based pricing. The base case, for almost the second half of last year was around $40 and we added in options for things like an additional stream and pay-per-view and other things.”
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