Services
Netflix Price UK and Every Streaming Service Costed
Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Paramount+, ITVX and Discovery+ all raised prices in the last eighteen months, and all six now sell a cheaper ad-supported tier that is not quite the same product. This page prices every one of them, monthly and annually, and shows which annual plans genuinely save money rather than simply moving the payment.
The short answer
- Netflix runs from £5.99 with adverts to £18.99 for 4K on four screens.
- Only three UK services offer an annual plan, and two of them are worth it.
- Ad tiers cost roughly half, and remove downloads more often than adverts.
- The average UK household now pays about £46 a month across four services.
There is no longer a simple answer to what streaming costs in Britain. Every major service has split into two or three tiers, most have added adverts at the bottom, several have quietly removed features from the plans people were already on, and only a handful offer an annual option. The result is that two households paying for "Netflix and Disney" can be spending £11 or £32 a month for what looks, from the outside, like the same thing.
This page prices all of it. Every tier of every mainstream UK streaming service, monthly and annual, current as of August 2026 — plus what each ad-supported tier actually takes away, which is rarely just the adverts.
These are list prices taken from each provider’s own UK site. They exclude bundles sold through broadband providers, which are covered separately in our guide to Sky packages and prices.
How much does streaming cost in the UK?
Start with the headline number, because it reframes everything else. A household taking the standard ad-free tier of the four most common services — Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video and one sports or entertainment add-on — is now spending more per month than a Sky Signature subscription costs.
£46
Average UK household
Across roughly four services
£552
Per year
More than a full TV Licence and Freely
£19
The same four on ad tiers
Where the saving actually is
That third figure is the one worth sitting with. Moving the same four services to their ad-supported tiers cuts the bill by roughly sixty per cent. Whether that trade is worth making depends entirely on what each provider removes alongside the adverts, which varies far more than people expect and is covered further down.
It is also worth noting how recent all of this is. In 2019 a British household with Netflix and Amazon Prime was spending around £16 a month and had access to most of what was being made. The catalogue has since fragmented across at least six services, each holding exclusive rights to programmes that used to sit together, and the cost of following the same amount of television has roughly tripled. Nothing about that fragmentation was driven by demand from viewers, and none of it is likely to reverse.
How much is Netflix in the UK?
Netflix is the service people search for by price more than any other, and NOW TV vs Netflix sets it against the live-television alternative, and it has the widest spread between its cheapest and dearest tier — a factor of more than three. There are three plans, no annual option, and no student or family discount of any kind.
Netflix UK at a glance
- Standard with ads
- £5.99 a month
- Standard
- £12.99 a month
- Premium
- £18.99 a month
- Annual plan
- None — monthly only
- Max quality
- 1080p on Standard, 4K HDR on Premium
- Simultaneous screens
- 2 on Standard and below, 4 on Premium
- Downloads
- Limited on the ad tier
- Extra member
- About £5 a month, Standard and above
The jump most households get wrong is Standard to Premium. Seven pounds a month buys 4K, spatial audio and four simultaneous streams instead of two. If you have a 4K television and more than two people watching, that is reasonable value. If you watch on one 1080p set, you are paying £84 a year for nothing you can perceive.
One genuine saving is worth knowing: Netflix at its ad-supported tier is bundled free into Sky Signature, and Netflix Standard is bundled into Sky Ultimate TV. A household already paying Sky is very often paying Netflix twice without realising. Our Sky packages breakdown sets out exactly which tier includes which.
Which streaming service is cheapest? Prices compared
Set against those monthly figures, the single-payment alternative reads very differently. This page is about films and box sets, so the plan below is the one built for them — IPTV 8K Ultra Max, with the deepest on-demand catalogue of any tier and the picture quality to match. Four terms, one payment each, nothing renewing in the background.
IPTV 8K Ultra Max
From £3.93/mo8K HDR + Dolby Atmos — the pinnacle
The most advanced plan on the list. True 8K Ultra HD with Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos sound, 55,000+ live channels, 220,000+ on-demand films and series, and multi-language subtitles on everything.
Starter 8K
3 Months
£39.99−25%
£29.99
£10.00/mo
- 55,000+ live channels in up to 8K
- 220,000+ films & series on demand
- 8K UHD + Dolby Vision HDR
- Dolby Atmos immersive audio
- Multi-language subtitles
- Full EPG guide
- 1 screen
- 24/7 UK support
Secure payment
Standard 8K
6 Months
£69.99−29%
£49.99
£8.33/mo
- 55,000+ live channels in up to 8K
- 220,000+ films & series on demand
- 8K UHD + Dolby Vision HDR
- Dolby Atmos immersive audio
- Multi-language subtitles
- EPG + 3-day replay
- 1 screen
- Priority UK support 24/7
Secure payment
Premium 8K
12 Months
2 months free£99.99−30%
£69.99
£5.00/mo
- 55,000+ live channels in up to 8K
- 220,000+ films & series in 8K / 4K
- 8K UHD + Dolby Vision HDR
- Dolby Atmos object-based audio
- Multi-language subtitles throughout
- EPG + 7-day replay
- 1 screen
- VIP WhatsApp support 24/7
- Free automatic updates
Secure payment
Ultimate 8K
24 Months
4 months free£124.99−12%
£109.99
£3.93/mo
- 55,000+ live channels in up to 8K
- 220,000+ films & series in 8K / 4K
- 8K UHD + Dolby Vision HDR
- Dolby Atmos 7.1+ surround sound
- Multi-language subtitles throughout
- EPG + 14-day replay
- 1 screen
- VIP WhatsApp instant support
- Early access to new 8K content
- Optimised 8K HEVC / AV1 streaming
Secure payment
Read the four terms together and the pattern is the opposite of the streaming services above. There, the longer you stay the more you pay, because every plan is monthly and every price has risen at least once a year since 2022. Here the rate falls the further out you commit — £10.00 a month across three months, £3.93 across twenty-four — and whatever you pay today is fixed for the whole term.
Do annual streaming plans save money?
Sometimes. Only three mainstream UK services offer one, and each is only a saving if you would still be subscribed in month eleven. Amazon Prime is the exception, because the delivery benefit alone justifies the £95 a year.
Which annual plans are real discounts
NOW is the exception that runs no annual plan at all — its entry offers work differently.
Only three mainstream UK services sell an annual plan, and the arithmetic is straightforward once laid out side by side. The test is not whether the discount exists but whether you will still want the service in month eleven.
| Service | Monthly ×12 | Annual | You save | Worth it? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Disney+ Standard | £107.88 | £89.90 | £17.98 | Yes, if used year-round |
| Paramount+ | £83.88 | £69.90 | £13.98 | Only for a long watchlist |
| ITVX Premium | £71.88 | £59.99 | £11.89 | Only for heavy ITV viewers |
| Amazon Prime | £107.88 | £95.00 | £12.88 | Yes, delivery pays for it |
| Netflix | £155.88 | Not offered | — | No annual plan exists |
| Discovery+ | £47.88 | Not offered | — | No annual plan exists |
Amazon Prime is the outlier and deserves separate thought. At £95 a year the video service is arguably incidental — the delivery saving alone covers the cost for anyone ordering twice a month, which makes the streaming effectively free. It is the only subscription on this page where the video is not the main reason to hold it.
Are the cheaper ad tiers worth it?
Only if you never watch offline. The cheaper tiers take away more than they admit — most importantly downloads on some services — so check what the tier removes, not just whether it shows adverts, before switching to save a few pounds.
Every service now sells an ad-supported tier at roughly half price, and the marketing implies the only difference is adverts. That is not true of any of them. The removals below matter more than the interruptions for most households. The same trap applies to hardware: a cheap stick that cannot decode the tier you are paying for wastes the difference, which which Firestick model to buy covers, and on an older set what a smart TV can actually play is worth checking first.
| Service | Ad tier price | Ads per hour | What else is removed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Netflix | £5.99 | ~4 min | Download limits; some titles missing entirely |
| Disney+ | £4.99 | ~4 min | No downloads at all; capped at 1080p |
| Prime Video | Included | ~3 min | Ad-free costs about £2.99 extra on top |
| Paramount+ | £3.99 | ~5 min | No downloads; no Showtime content |
| ITVX | Free | ~6 min | No BritBox catalogue |
Downloads are the removal that catches people out. If anyone in the household watches on a commute, a plane or a patchy connection, the ad tier of Disney+ and Paramount+ is not a cheaper version of the same product — it is a different product that will not work when they need it.
The Prime Video change deserves its own note because it happened to existing customers rather than new ones. Adverts now appear by default on a subscription many households have held for a decade, and removing them costs extra on top of the Prime fee they were already paying. Nothing was taken away in name; the same money now buys less.
An ad tier that removes downloads is not a discount. It is a different product sold under the same name at a lower price.
How much does sports streaming cost?
Everything above sits between £4 and £19 a month. Sport does not — the cheapest way to watch the Premier League costs every route in full — and any household budgeting for streaming needs to treat it as a separate category rather than one more service on the pile. The cheapest route to a full season of Premier League football costs more than Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+ and ITVX Premium combined.
| Route | Monthly | What it carries | Minimum term |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOW TV Sports | ~£35 | Every Sky Sports channel | None |
| NOW TV day pass | ~£15 | Sky Sports for 24 hours | None |
| Sky Sports add-on | ~£27 | Same channels, added to Sky | 31 days |
| Discovery+ Premium | £30.99 | TNT Sports — UCL and Premier League | None |
| Amazon Prime | £8.99 | A handful of Premier League fixtures | None |
The structural problem for British sports viewers is that no single subscription carries everything. The Premier League is split between Sky and TNT, the Champions League sits with TNT through Discovery+, and Amazon holds a small package of its own. Following one competition properly means holding at least two of these, which is why sport routinely doubles a household streaming bill on its own.
The one genuine saving is seasonality. Sports subscriptions run on rolling terms, and the Premier League season covers ten months rather than twelve. Dropping NOW TV Sports for June and July saves £70 a year and costs you nothing you would have watched. The same logic applies in reverse for cricket. Our NOW TV review covers how the day passes compare against a full month once you count how often you actually sit down for a fixture.
What you are actually paying per hour watched
Divide the bill by the hours you actually watch and the ranking changes completely. Spreading the same ninety monthly viewing hours across four services makes each of them expensive per hour; concentrating on two makes both cheap, even though the total bill is half the size.
Cost per hour, and why it changes the answer
Monthly price is the wrong unit for judging a subscription, because it says nothing about use. A more honest measure is cost per hour actually watched, and it reorders the list dramatically. The figures below assume a household watching about ninety hours of television a month in total, split across whatever they subscribe to.
| Hours watched per month | Netflix Standard | Disney+ annual | Discovery+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 hours | £6.50/hr | £3.75/hr | £2.00/hr |
| 10 hours | £1.30/hr | £0.75/hr | £0.40/hr |
| 30 hours | £0.43/hr | £0.25/hr | £0.13/hr |
| 60 hours | £0.22/hr | £0.12/hr | £0.07/hr |
The lesson is not that heavy viewing is good value. It is that holding four subscriptions splits a fixed number of viewing hours four ways, and pushes every one of them into the expensive rows of that table. Two services watched properly cost less per hour than four services watched occasionally, even though the monthly bill for four is twice as large.
This is the arithmetic behind rotating rather than stacking. A household that holds Netflix and one other, then swaps that second service every few months, watches the same amount of television for roughly half the money — and gets more out of each catalogue, because they arrive at it with a backlog rather than having already skimmed the good parts.
It also explains why free services matter more than their price suggests. Every hour spent on Freely or BBC iPlayer is an hour not diluting a paid subscription, which quietly improves the value of everything else you hold.
How can you cut your streaming bill?
Hold fewer services at once rather than cheaper versions of the same ones. Most households can drop a paid service every few months and lose nothing, because a catalogue watched properly is exhausted in weeks — and a free platform covers live channels for nothing.
The swaps that save the most
NOW is the one to time rather than trim — where its entry offers actually appear covers when.
- Rotate rather than stack. Keep one or two services live and cycle the rest by season — most catalogues take a month to exhaust.
- Check the annual plan properly. Only some genuinely discount; others simply move the payment forward.
- Buy Prime Video alone if you never use the delivery side.
- Let a free platform handle live TV. Freeview Play and Freely charge nothing for the channels themselves.
- Cancel before the renewal date, not after — almost none of these refund a part-month.
The average household is carrying about £46 a month. Most of that can go without meaningfully changing what anyone watches, because the overlap between these services is larger than any of them advertise. Two structural swaps beat any amount of tier-juggling: replacing live channels entirely, which our full price list costs out, and dropping to a free platform such as Freeview Play or a Freely box for the broadcast half. If the bill you are really trying to cut is the licence rather than the subscriptions, what you can watch without one is the page for that.
Work down this list. The first two steps typically remove half the bill on their own and take about ten minutes.
Check what your Sky or broadband package already includes
Sky Signature includes Netflix with adverts. Sky Ultimate TV includes Netflix Standard and Discovery+. A very large number of households pay for both separately without noticing.
Cancel anything you have not opened in a month
None of these services carry a minimum term. Cancelling and returning three months later costs nothing, and every one of them keeps your watchlist.
Rotate rather than stack
Hold one or two at a time and move between them. Catalogues change slowly, so a service you drop in March will have more to watch when you return in July than it does today.
Move the ones you keep to annual
Only if you are confident. Disney+ and Prime are the two where the discount is large enough and the usage steady enough to justify committing.
Add Freely before you add anything paid
It is free, it carries the channels most British households watch most, and it is already built into most televisions sold since 2024.
One structural point that saves more than any individual cancellation: nothing on this page except Prime Video has a minimum term. Streaming subscriptions are month-to-month by design, which means the correct number to hold at any moment is however many you are actually watching — usually one or two, not four.
If the honest answer is that the television mostly shows BBC, ITV and Channel 4, then Freely or Freesat covers it for nothing, and the entire £552 a year is available to stop spending.
Our verdict
What is actually worth paying for
Netflix Standard remains the one subscription most households will keep, and at £12.99 it is defensible. Amazon Prime justifies itself on delivery alone. Disney+ on the annual plan is good value for a family. Everything else on this page is better rotated than held, and two of the best options in Britain still cost nothing at all.
What works
- No minimum term on anything except Prime — rotate freely
- Disney+, Paramount+ and ITVX all discount annual by about 17%
- Sky Signature and Ultimate TV already include Netflix
- Freely covers most British viewing for nothing
What doesn’t
- Ad tiers remove downloads, not just adverts
- Prime Video added adverts to existing subscriptions
- Netflix offers no annual plan and no discounts at all
- Every service has raised prices at least once since 2023
Frequently asked questions
How much is Disney Plus price-wise in the UK now?
Disney+ sells a Standard with Ads tier, a Standard tier and a Premium tier with 4K and four screens. The Disney Plus price rose across all three in the last eighteen months, and the annual plan is one of the few in this market that genuinely saves money rather than simply moving the payment. Check the table above for the current figures.
What is the Amazon Prime price UK subscribers pay for video alone?
Prime Video can be bought on its own, without the delivery and music benefits, at a lower monthly rate. Most households do not realise this and pay the full Prime membership for a service they use only to watch television. If you never use next-day delivery, the video-only Amazon Prime price is the one to compare.
What is the Paramount Plus price, and is it worth it?
Paramount+ is among the cheaper mainstream services in Britain and periodically appears bundled with other subscriptions, which changes the arithmetic considerably. Judged on catalogue size per pound it competes well; judged on how often a household actually opens it, it is one of the first to cut.
What is the Discovery Plus cost for the sports tiers?
Discovery+ runs an entertainment tier and dearer tiers carrying sport, and the gap between them is large. The Discovery Plus cost only makes sense if you specifically want the sport it carries — for documentaries and factual alone, the base tier is the one to take.
What is the Netflix price UK viewers pay in 2026?
Netflix UK has three tiers: Standard with adverts at £5.99 a month, Standard at £12.99 and Premium at £18.99. There is no annual plan and no student discount. Standard gives 1080p on two screens with no adverts; Premium adds 4K HDR, spatial audio and four simultaneous streams.
How much is Disney+ a month?
Disney+ Standard is £8.99 a month, or £89.90 for a year — which works out at £7.49 a month and saves about £18 over twelve months. There is an ad-supported tier at £4.99, though it removes downloads entirely and caps quality at 1080p, and a Premium tier with 4K at £12.99 a month.
Which streaming service is the cheapest in the UK?
Among paid services, Discovery+ Entertainment at £3.99 a month and Paramount+ at £6.99 are the cheapest full subscriptions. But the genuinely cheapest options are free: Freely and Freesat carry the main British channels at no cost beyond the TV Licence, and ITVX and BBC iPlayer are free to use.
Do annual streaming plans actually save money?
On the three services that offer them, yes — Disney+, Paramount+ and ITVX Premium each discount their annual plan by roughly seventeen per cent, about two months free. Amazon Prime saves around £13 a year. Netflix and Discovery+ do not sell annual plans at all. The discount only pays off if you would have kept the service for the full twelve months anyway.
What is the catch with the cheaper ad-supported tiers?
It is rarely just the adverts. Disney+ and Paramount+ remove downloads entirely on their ad tiers, Netflix applies download limits and omits some titles for licensing reasons, and ITVX without Premium loses the BritBox catalogue. If anyone in the household watches offline, the ad tier is a different product rather than a cheaper one.
Am I paying for Netflix twice with Sky?
Quite possibly. Sky Signature includes Netflix at its ad-supported tier at no extra cost, and Sky Ultimate TV includes Netflix Standard, which is ad-free. A household on either package that also pays Netflix directly is buying the same subscription twice. Check your Sky package before renewing.
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