Earlier this month, fuboTV made the decision to stop offering new subscribers a monthly plan option (following a seven-day free trial), moving their shortest option to quarterly. At that time, though, they said they weren’t committing to sticking with that, with spokesperson Jennifer Press telling Phillip Swann of TV Answer Man “We have temporarily made our channel packages available to new subscribers as quarterly plans. We’re always experimenting with our channel package offerings to better understand what our subscribers like.” Now, as per Matt Tamanini of The Streamable, fuboTV has brought back the monthly plan option for new subscribers:
Last week, fuboTV officially dropped their monthly billing option in an effort to transition to a quarterly format. However, just 10 days later, the sports streaming service has reversed course and is back to the monthly plan.
For subscribers who opted for the quarterly plans in the short window of opportunity, their billing cycle will change today.
As Tamanini notes, the logic with the shift to quarterly was to try to reduce subscriber churn. And there’s certainly some merit to that from the company’s perspective. However, it’s challenging for one company alone to make that shift when other virtual multichannel video providers like YouTube TV and Hulu+Live TV are offering month-by-month options. And shifting to quarterly-and-up billings plan may come with less subscriber churn, but it also comes with at least a potential slowdown of new subscribers, with people unwilling to make a full three-month commitment.
So there are tradeoffs there, and this switch back from fuboTV seems to suggest the tradeoff here wasn’t worth keeping for them going forward. There is some considerable noise around this with the timing of the Olympics and the Super Bowl, two things that often prompt plenty of new-service signups. But even there, perhaps the new signups weren’t at the level they hoped for, and maybe that led to going back to offering these monthly plans. At any rate, new fuboTV customers can now again sign up for monthly plans, so this quarterly shift was a short-lived experiment. We’ll see if the idea of quarterly minimums comes up again, from fuboTV or other vMVPDs, but for now, monthly is back.