Paramount Plus suddenly looks a lot less appealing to me than Netflix

(Image credit: Paramount)

published 24 June 2022

Good news for Sky customers: you have access to Paramount Plus for free. The bad news? There's not a great deal worth watching in my opinion – and if you're not getting it for free, I don't see anything here that'll make you drop everything and take out a subscription.

And I don't think that even though Netflix is considerably more expensive we'll see a mass migration of viewers from it to Paramount Plus, either.

The short version? There's nothing killer to watch in my opinion.

I don't mean that in numerical terms. Paramount has over 8,000 hours of TV for you to stream. It's an issue of quality for me, not quantity.

Paramount Plus Halo TV series — I like Halo, but I'd prefer to play Halo than watch Halo.

To boldly go quite a lot of places we've been before

Looking at the list of shows, it's hard to suppress a yawn. If you're into Star Trek then the new Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will appeal, and I imagine the Halo series is fun, albeit not as much fun as actually playing Halo. But so many of the names are so very familiar, because they're from channels we've already seen (and in many cases already had on Sky): Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon.

Maybe the foreign originals will be great, and the prospect of documentaries from UK teams is more tantalising than some of the titles announced so far ("LA Hairdressers", "Fashion House" and "Pervert: Catching the Strip Search caller"). But really what we're seeing here isn't a new service but increasing fragmentation of the streaming landscape: as my colleague Rob wrote the other day, it's basically asking you to subscribe to more services and pay more money to get the same shows.

I agree with Rob: the aggressive ring-fencing of shows may make sense from a business perspective – of course Disney and Paramount don't want Netflix to have their shows when they're selling their own streaming services – but for viewers, streaming is becoming more expensive and more frustrating with each new streamer that launches. It feels like we're rapidly heading back to the days of cable TV, when the only way to see all the shows you wanted was to pay for a bundle largely comprised of channels you didn't want and never watched. Streaming was supposed to save us from that.

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).