from the meet-the-new-boss dept

Streaming TV Prices Rising Faster Than Cable Ever Did

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.

That has involved chasing pointless “growth for growth’s sake” megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions on customers, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.

Streaming TV prices hikes are coming so fast and furious, they’re outpacing many of the ridiculous traditional cable TV price hikes we saw during the cord cutting revolution:

“Over the course of the past 12 months, streaming rates have collectively risen 11.8 percent. The biggest year of increase was 2023, when the streamers shot up an average of 17.7 percent. A Hollywood Reporter analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows cable and satellite prices, by comparison, rose an annual average of 3.9 percent — excluding a deregulation surge of the late 1980s, when the index peaked at 14 percent. But that was a seismic shift provoked by a federal intervention rather than, say, because Widow’s Bay is a good show, or “we’re pretty sure we can get away with this.”

That shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Many of the same cable TV executives that enshittified traditional cable TV have moved on to streaming. And all the same quarterly growth pressures still apply. It’s not good enough to offer a good, affordable product people like; impossible scale is a siren song that, sooner or later, leaves many of these companies thrashed on the rocks.

There remain some notable positives though. Users are still free to subscribe to a streaming service, binge watch everything of interest, and then cancel to save money. That’s a big improvement from the traditional days of the bloated cable TV bundle.

Initially, streaming TV providers saw significantly higher customer satisfaction scores that big TV providers like Comcast. But that’s slowly changed over the last few years, as frustration with streaming TV grows and traditional cable TV providers try a little harder to improve. The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) scores now show tech companies and traditional cable companies neck and neck:

“The results arrive during a period of rising subscription costs and mounting consumer fatigue. Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends survey found that 73% of streaming consumers are frustrated with rising prices, around 40% cancel at least one paid service each year, and 61% say they would cancel their favorite service if monthly costs rose by just $5. The average subscribing household spends $69 per month on four streaming video services.”

What happens next? Well you can see that with growth saturated, media giants have started shifting their attention to mergers and consolidation, just like traditional cable, phone, and media companies did. That means even more price hikes to pay off debt, significant layoffs, and corner cutting that results in lower-quality overall product.

I suspect once they’re more meaningfully consolidated and fully enshittified, they’ll find some creative way to make cancelling and resubscribing annoying, especially if the U.S. continues its steady trend of lobotomizing its regulators at the behest of corporate power.

That could most likely come in the form of telecom and media companies merging and then tethering your subscription tightly to wireless phone and internet discounts. Or simply going the AOL route and make cancellation annoying as hell. Who is going to stop them? The Trump FTC?

Ultimately this enshittification will result in more and more users flocking to free or cheap short form video alternatives. Or simply reverting to piracy, at which point (and I’m sorry to keep beating this dead horse) all the execs responsible will blame everything (VPNs, generational entitlement, China) but themselves.