• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, April 5, 2022

FuboTV, which last week stopped offering new subscribers its $64.99 Starter plan, has now announced that it will move existing users of that plan to its Pro plan, at $5 more per month, starting May 1.

The move was welcomed by investors, who drove fuboTV’s stock price up 15% after Monday’s announcement.

Like the Starter plan, fubo Pro offers 120-plus channels and 130 events in 4K. But it also includes channels from the GAC Family and the Magnolia Network (Magnolia was an $8 add-on for the Starter plan). Pro also includes 10 simultaneous streams and 1,000 hours of cloud DVR storage, to the Starter plan’s three streams and 250 storage hours.

The forced migration to Pro also applies to customers on earlier legacy promotional bundles (such as the Family, Entertainment, Ultra and Starter Promo plans).

However, subscribers who are billed through Roku will, at least for now, see no pricing or features changes, fuboTV said on its website.

In addition to the $69.99 per month Pro plan, fuboTV offers an Elite plan with 174 channels (including 10 additional news channels) and 130 events and the enhanced streams and storage features at $79.99 per month, and a Latino Plan with 40 Spanish-language channels at $32.99 per month.

The new pricing puts fuboTV in line with rival virtual multiplatform programming video distributors (vMVPDs) Hulu + Live TV, which raised it price to $69.99 per month last November, and added Disney+ and ESPN+ and DirecTV Stream, also starting at $69.99 (although it’s currently offering news subscribers the first three months for $59.99).

YouTube TV is still at $65 per month.

In February, fuboTV tried dropping monthly billing and instituting quarterly-only subscription plans for new subscribers, only to drop the experiment within a week.

Fubo TV had 1.13 million global subscribers as of year-end 2021, up 106% versus year-end 2020. As of February, it reported having 1.315 million global subscribers, including 185,000 it brought on through its late 2021 acquisition of Molotov.

Total revenue for full-year 2021, including revenue from its recent acquisition of the French service Molotov, was a record $638 million. Without Molotov, it was $637 million — up 144% over 2020.

Advertising revenue in Q4 was $26.1 million, includingthe  $0.2 million impact of Molotov -- up from $25 million estimated in fuboTV's Jan. 10 preliminary projections.

The company closed 2021 with a net loss of $383 million, down from $610 million (on $261.5 million in revenue) in 2020.

FuboTV is projecting Q1 2022 revenue of between $232 million and $237 million and full-year revenue of $1.08 billion to $1.09 billion.

Analysts tracked by FactSet had been expecting $238.5 million in overall revenue for Q1 and $1.15 billion for the full year.