Best Streaming Platforms and Bundles

When we lined up two widely read price guides side by side, we found that they did not agree. One, last updated August 20, still listed Peacock at $7.99 to $16.99 and Disney+ at $19.99 ad-free for the Disney and Hulu pairing, and it contradicted itself between its summary table and body text on Peacock and Apple TV. A second guide, checked against a dated October 1 snapshot, showed the new post-hike numbers. We resolved each conflict by going to a dated report on the specific increase: TVLine for the September 23 Disney and Hulu change, Droid Life for the August 18 Peacock change, MacRumors for the August 28 Apple TV change, and HBO Max’s own help page for its plan prices.

The table below uses only figures we could tie to one of those. Prices are before tax. A promotional price, an annual plan or a carrier deal can beat them, so treat this as the ceiling you should be paying, not the floor.

We worked through each bundle by subtracting what the same services cost bought one at a time. The pattern we found was that a handful save real money, and several of the loudest ones are perks for customers of a specific carrier, retailer or internet provider rather than deals anyone can sign up for.

Two of those numbers need an honest footnote. The Disney, Hulu and HBO Max trio prices ($19.99 with ads, $32.99 without) come from a bundle roundup that does not carry a date, and the ad-free Disney and Hulu pairing inside it was listed at $19.99, which is the price before September’s $2 increase. So the trio may have moved too. We could not find a dated report confirming either way. If you’re about to buy it, look at the sign-up page rather than trusting any guide, including this one. The savings logic still holds even if the price shifted by a couple of dollars.

The Apple TV and Peacock pairing is the other one to treat carefully. It was listed at $14.99 with Peacock Premium and $19.99 with Premium Plus. Both Apple TV and Peacock have since raised their standalone prices, and we found no updated bundle price, so we marked it unverified instead of quoting a number that is probably stale.

Several of the best “bundles” never appear on a streaming service’s pricing page. Amazon Prime includes Prime Video. Walmart+ lets a member choose either Paramount+ or Peacock, with ads. T-Mobile has offered Netflix on its plans for some wireless customers. Xfinity StreamSaver has bundled Netflix, Peacock and Apple TV, and Verizon’s myPlan has offered discounted pairings including Netflix with HBO Max and a Disney trio. The roundup that listed these gave no prices and no end dates for most of them, which is itself the warning: these perks change, they depend on your plan tier, and they can disappear when a promotion ends.

The practical move is a five-minute audit. Log in to your phone carrier, your internet provider and any retail membership, and look for a streaming section. If you’re paying for Peacock or Paramount+ separately while a Walmart+ membership would give you one of them for free, you are paying twice for the same thing. We found that this duplication is the easiest dollar to recover in the whole category.

Paramount Skydance completed its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal widely reported at around $110 billion, after a court cleared the way. That puts HBO Max, Discovery+ and Paramount+ under one owner. At the March 2 investor call announcing the plan, David Ellison said the company intended to put the two main services together and cited a combined figure of a little over 200 million subscribers. Reporters pointed out that the number simply adds estimates (about 123 million for Warner’s services and 79 million for Paramount+) and that it assumes every household moves over, which it won’t, because many homes subscribe to both.

What we found when we compared the reports from the first week after closing is that they agree on the important parts. The two apps keep running separately. Plans, prices and logins are unchanged for now. No name, launch date or price has been announced for a combined service, and the commonly quoted $19.99 for an HBO Max and Paramount+ pairing came from a consumer survey about a hypothetical bundle, not from the company. Ellison has said a bundle could come “in the relatively short term,” and one trade report, citing unnamed sources, said the technology work could take about a year. That last point is reported, not confirmed.

The fastest way to waste money here is to buy “a sports service” without checking where your team plays. We went league by league through what each package carries. ESPN Unlimited, at $29.99 a month, includes ESPN, ESPN on ABC, ESPN2, SEC Network, ACC Network and a long list of leagues such as the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, college football including the playoff, major golf and tennis events, and several international soccer leagues. Fox One, at $19.99, includes Fox, FS1, Big Ten Network, and covers the NFL, MLB, the FIFA World Cup, NASCAR, college football and basketball, and soccer including MLS. Buying both together is $39.99, a $10 monthly saving.

What that bundle does not carry matters as much. It does not include NBC Sports, CBS Sports, Turner Sports, regional sports networks, or league-run packages such as NFL Sunday Ticket and MLB.TV. If your local team’s games air on a regional network, no amount of ESPN and Fox will replace it. And the pricing above is what the bundle’s launch coverage reported; we could not find a dated report of a change, but check before you commit.

The idea is simple: keep one service you use constantly, and rent the others for the weeks you actually have something to watch. To see whether it’s worth the hassle, we priced a year of five ad-supported plans two ways, using the list prices above. Running all five continuously (Netflix at $8.99, the Disney+ and Hulu bundle at $12.99, HBO Max Basic at $10.99, Peacock Select at $8.99 and Paramount+ Essential at $8.99) costs $50.95 a month, or $611.40 a year.

Now rotate. Keep Netflix all year: $107.88. Rent the Disney and Hulu bundle for three months: $38.97. Rent HBO Max for two months: $21.98. Peacock for two months: $17.98. Paramount+ for two months: $17.98. The yearly total is $204.79, a difference of $406.61. You still watch something from every service. You just don’t pay for it during the months you weren’t watching.

The honest caveat is that rotation has costs that don’t show up in a spreadsheet. Each cancel and restart is a few minutes of attention. Some services have a gap between your cancellation and when the content you wanted returns. And the savings depend on you being disciplined. If you are the kind of person who forgets to cancel, set a phone reminder for the day before each renewal.

There is also a counter-argument worth stating. Annual plans can beat monthly ones: Peacock Select is $89.99 a year against $107.88 for twelve months, and HBO Max Basic is $109.99 against $131.88. If you know you’ll keep a service all year, annual wins by $18 to $22. The trick is to buy annual only on the service you truly keep, and to hold off on annual for HBO Max and Paramount+ until the new owner explains how those plans will be treated.

The data on how people behave is encouraging for the rotation approach. Antenna defines a “serial churner” as someone who has canceled three or more premium streaming services in the past two years, and reported that nearly one in four U.S. streaming consumers qualified at the end of 2023, a 42 percent jump from a year earlier. A separate report, citing the Wall Street Journal, put the same group at about one-quarter, up from 15 percent two years earlier. These are older numbers, but they point in one direction: leaving and returning is now ordinary behavior, not an edge case. Of premium streaming cancelers, about one in four resubscribes within four months, a third within seven, and half within two years.

Antenna’s most recent quarterly update adds a second layer. Smaller “specialty” services, such as niche genre, anime or international apps, reached more than 42 million paying subscribers, up 14 percent over the year, while premium services grew 6 percent. Specialty churn ran about 4 percent in June, peaking at 9 percent in January, and runs 2 to 4 points above premium services. After 12 months, 27 percent of specialty subscribers remained against 35 percent for premium. If you’re thinking about adding a niche app, the sensible default is a short stay.

Free, ad-supported streaming has become big enough that it’s no longer a fallback. Tubi reported 110 million monthly active users in an August 6 announcement, up 14 percent over the year, and said it reached an all-time high of 2.3 percent of total U.S. TV viewing in April, a figure it attributed to Nielsen’s The Gauge. Over the previous twelve months, Tubi said more than 13 billion hours were streamed. The same ecosystem includes The Roku Channel and Pluto TV, which a cord-cutting news site has described as the three largest free streaming services.

Free services won’t have the newest prestige drama. What they offer is depth in older films, long-running series and live-style channels, which is exactly the viewing that fills the gaps between a paid service’s big releases. The sensible split is to let background and rewatch viewing live on a free service, and keep the paid subscription for the shows you actually schedule time to watch.