Paramount Plus wants to lure you in with limited free access

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Every streaming platform out there asks us to make a few decisions: Is this content something we’re interested in? Is it worth paying for? And if so, how much? With streaming prices on the rise pretty much everywhere, and platforms constantly dropping and picking up new content, many of us find ourselves reevaluating that balance over and over again. Today we’re learning about an all-new option that one provider has quietly started playing with, as Paramount Plus experiments with the idea of free, ad-supported access.

Paramount Plus already offers a plan with ads, but not the free kind. The service officially has just two tiers: ad-free Premium for $14 a month, and Essential with ads for $9 a month. But now Paramount is also apparently starting to give some Android users access to a limited selection of ad-supported episodes of programs, with no subscription needed at all (via Cord Cutters News ).

Users involved in this test will reportedly be able to stream up to two episodes of programs without needing a paid account. It’s not yet clear the full scope of restrictions involved here, and just how much choice viewers may get in regards to the free access. A leak from earlier this summer already teased Paramount working on a system like this:

While this test is supposedly running with the Paramount Plus app on both Android phones and tablets, we haven’t heard anything about whether or not that also extends to Android TV.

The idea of reaching out with free content to get viewers interested is hardly a new one, but how Paramount is going about it here feels a little odd. Mainly we wonder how many people without subscriptions are even installing the app in the first place — and if Paramount’s not advertising this offer, who would just randomly stumble upon it?

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