Sky’s streaming service, NOW (formerly known as NOW TV) will cost more for some customers soon, with monthly prices going up on some of the service’s plans.
The affected memberships are the monthly NOW Sky Sports membership, as well as NOW Boost, which is an optional add-on to all the other NOW memberships.
While Sky Sports is of main concern to sports fans, NOW Boost adds some pretty basic functions to Sky’s streaming service – including Full HD content (1080p). Without Boost, NOW customers only get 720p video resolutions.
NOW’s prices will go up on February 28, with the Sky Sports membership going up by £1/month, and the NOW Boost add-on going up by £1/month as well (see full details below).
This price increase is one of many upcoming TV and broadband cost hikes, including in the streaming arena – as we recently reported, BT Sport’s Monthly Pass price will also go up in February.
NOW is Sky’s original standalone streaming service that doesn’t require a long-term contract and works as an app on many supported devices.
Recently, Sky also launched its Sky Stream, which is also a streaming service from Sky – but one that only works with the Sky Stream puck, and has a different interface (and pricing scheme) – See our Sky Stream VS NOW comparison.
NOW offers three main content packages (“memberships”):
- NOW Entertainment, at £9.99/m, with Sky’s TV channels, including Sky Atlantic, and content for kids.
- NOW Cinema, at £9.99/month. Identical to the Sky Cinema plan Sky, with new blockbusters and back-catalogue films.
- NOW Sky Sports, currently at £33.99/month. Almost identical to Sky Sports on Sky (with Racing, Mix and News being part of this membership instead of Entertainment).
Then there’s NOW Boost, which currently costs £5/month – and adds Full HD (1080p) video quality, Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, no adverts (for on-demand content. You’ll still see adverts on Sky’s live channels), and the ability to stream on up to 3 devices at the same time (instead of just one).
NOW is available on a wide range of streaming devices, including Amazon’s Fire TV, Roku, Google’s Chromecast, mobile phones, tablets and more.
NOW’s February Price Increase
Starting from February 28, 2023, NOW will be raising prices for two of its plans:
The NOW Sports Membership will go up from £33.99/month to £34.99/month.
The NOW Boost add-on will go up from £5/month to £6/month.
This means you can still snag both at the lower price point – but only for one month, since they’re renewed month-to-month without long-term contracts.
Therefore, if you sign up for NOW Sport today, you will pay £33.99 for one month – but your price will go up to £34.99 when the membership is renewed in 31 days (unless you cancel before that happens) – and the same goes for Boost.
With the NOW Sports price increase, the streaming service’s sports offer is now even more expensive than the similar offer on Sky’s OTHER streaming service, Sky Stream.
On Stream, you can get Sky Sports for £27/month on a 31-days rolling contract, or £25/month on an 18-month contract – and you don’t have to pay extra for Full HD, as you do on NOW.
If you’re only interested in specific sporting events, NOW also offers a daily NOW Sports pass, for a one-off payment of £11.98.
At the moment, if you subscribe to just one day of the NOW Sports daily pass, you’ll also get 9 months of NOW’s Mobile Sports pass at no extra cost.
The Mobile Pass can only be watched on a smartphone (and not on a TV), and only includes five channels:Sky Sports Premier League, Action/NFL,Arena,RacingandNews.
As for Boost, Sky last increased the price of NOW Boost back in 2021 – it originally cost £3/month, and was then raised to £5/month, and now to £6/month.
These days, NOW Boost adds functionality that is pretty basic on other streaming services, and is, therefore almost an essential part of a NOW subscription.
So when other streaming services, like Disney+ and Amazon’s Prime Video offer 4K video quality with every subscription, Sky’s NOW only offers 720p, which isn’t even Full HD – unless you pay extra for Boost.
Furthermore, adverts were added to NOW’s on-demand content back in 2021 – and if you want to skip those adverts, you must subscribe to NOW Boost, on top of your Entertainment / Cinema membership.
The bit of good news is that as of this writing, we’re not aware of price increases to NOW’s Entertainment and Cinema memberships – though, as always, those may come later in the year.