As Lionsgate and Starz separate, the Lionsgate+ streaming service is closing down in the UK in February 2024.
After the years of rampant growth, the streaming market has, inevitably, become hugely saturated in recent times. To the point where there are umpteen services to choose from in the UK alone, and questions over how sustainable the model is.
Here comes a fairly major casualty. Lionsgate has decided to exit the streaming business in the UK and Australia. It’s the offshoot of a corporate rejig that’s basically seeing Lionsgate de-merge from Starz, and in turn bring down its total workforce by some 10%.
Customers who subscribe to Lionsgate+ in the UK are now being written to, to be informed that their subscription will “automatically be cancelled on February 29th, 2024”.
For those who had paid for the service in advance, they’ll be refunded on a pro-rata basis. Unlike TalkTalk, that recently left customers out of pocket, it sounds like Lionsgate will be giving everyone a refund appropriate to how much subscription they had left on their service.
It’s now impossible to sign up for Lionsgate+ in the UK as well, as fresh subscriptions are not being accepted. Only existing subscribers will be able to continue using the service until the end of February.
With thanks to Mark Pledger, here’s the Sky help screen about the closure of the service.
The service is also closing down in Australia too.
According to Jeffrey Hirsch, the CEO of Starz, “we are making these changes to align our organization with the growth areas of the business and to prepare us for our next chapter as a standalone company”.
Lionsgate purchased Starz in 2016, and it’d be fair to say that the merger hasn’t quite gone to plan. Lionsgate+, at least in the UK, is now a casualty of trying to sort all of that out.
