alt Hacker NewsThe same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
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The title kind of buries important details about the distribution of these costs and their changes.
For example, Apple TV+ went from $4.99 per month to $14.99 per month, a +200% change, while YouTube Premium went from $11.99 to $15.99, a +33% change.
So services like Apple TV+ are skewing this increase a lot while services like YouTube Premium have remained relatively low. Similarly, Apple TV+ starting at $4.99 per month was clearly a very low price to start (which can probably be mostly attributed to the service's lack of content at that point). It's now at a "normal" price.
Just the same, saying something like something "costs $702/year more" without a point of reference is bad data presentation. The 2021 cost for all of these services was $1,150.92, for a +61% change. I'm not saying that's not substantial, but this kind of information is necessary for these figures to not just be rage bait.
And, of course, if you're simultaneously paying for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium, and Spotify every month, then you're either (a) really into consuming this kind of content and are a "premium subscriber" in the sense that these costs ought to be justified or (b) very bad with managing your time and finances. I suspect normal users subscribe to one or two of these at a time and are probably willing to switch around as prices change, content gets released/pulled, etc. A better analysis would try to do some investigation into this dynamic, since it will probably reveal that people are able to navigate dynamic service subscriptions well enough that they aren't actually experiencing a straight-up +61% increase in costs since 2021.
All of this is to say that this "analysis" barely even qualifies as a valid first-pass at understanding this kind of data. It's literally something that Claude probably churned out in 20 minutes. Everyone can be dissatisfied with the value they get from these streaming services, but this kind of post only helps to muddy the conversation.
One of the highest-value streaming subscriptions you can get is PBS Passport. You get it with a $60 donation to either a PBS TV or NPR radio station. The donation is tax-deductible and the PBS subscription is rich with high-quality content for both adults and children.
I am still happy with my decision to never get entertainment subscription services. I buy CDs (that I rip) and BDs (that I let someone else rip, since that's a science in itself). This guarantees me access forever and I get to sell down the line, if I feel like it.
It is way cheaper long term.
Important context here is that many of these streaming services operated at a loss for years, and some still are. HBO Max didn’t turn a profit until 2023 and Disney only become profitable in 2024 after bundling with Hulu. AFAIK Paramount+ and Peacock are still in the red.
Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.
We noticed this also for the online software services that we use. Many of them increased in price, which I can understand with rising costs. However, a large number of them also have/introduced a 'hostile' structure that force you into paying through the nose. Case in point was the timesheet software that we used:
* They increased the cost of all price tiers.
* They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more.
* And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing.
This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore.
You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...
There was a ~18 month period of time where prices went up 50-100% at stores like CVS and Walgreens. The large subscription price increases are merely matching the real inflation explosion we're seeing from the debasement of the USD due to extreme budget deficits and massive over-spending. Gold also has been correctly reflecting that procession for many years now.
Which is to say it's not the streaming prices, it's everything (except for maybe televisions, for now we get to keep our cheapish 50-80" TVs).
Any price comparison over time should include inflation.
Otherwise this is akin to comparing speed of 2 objects in a relativistic setting without stating the frame of reference.
Side note: I don't know why, but the existence of a "cite this" section on this page made me sad.
$702 more is relative and tells nothing without the basis. It's 61% increase in 5 years.
Price increases are tolerated if the value increases. Even rent-seeking is tolerated if the value is relatively stable. But what we have here is value proposition decreasing from fragmentation and shallow content and increasingly intrusive targeted ads while the prices keep going up.
We traded one annoying cable company for dozens.
The raise is even worse if you look further back than 2021. Netflix was 7.99 for ages, while the "floor" in 2021 is 13.99. Against the original baseline, the new 19.99 price is not a +43% but a +150%.
Most importantly 13.99 already in 2021 bought LESS than 7.99 or 8.99 bought until a while before. Thanks to the fragmentation, the catalogue was way larger before, and as of 2022 ads were introduced to further insult the customer.
High seas it is.
I like occasionally watching movies. I will rarely watch a movie twice. Streaming would be the best option for me, but I will not subscribe to more than one service. Get your shit together. Do cross licensing. Split production from distribution. Until then I will not be paying for any streaming service.
Equivalent to 10% year-to-year, every year - assuming 5 years. That is somewhat steep.
Do you think in the future, maybe in 5 to 10 years, that the vibe coded aesthetic will come back as a design trend?
Several of these services launched around 2021 with introductory pricing, which is necessary for attracting new users to a new service.
Most people I know don’t subscribe to every service and then leave it that way. They might have Spotify and 1-3 video streaming services at a time. They cancel one and start a different one when they want to watching something new.
Ok a price increase but:
"nine streaming subscriptions".
No one sane will do nine streaming subscriptions. The market is insane in itself for assuming that.
If buying ain’t owning, pirating ain’t stealing
Bring back DVD rentals!
In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).
I cancelled majority of my services for this exact reason. I was a member of netflix since 2015, when I checked my credit card bill last month and saw the charge I really had to question if it was even worth it at this point.
Besides youtube premium (because kid) and apple one (because icloud) I have no more subscriptions.
I love music and used to have Spotify, but I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog.
Now I buy online or rip my CDs, it’s much better and works offline.
Streaming is basically a sounding error in my budget. Now if we’re talking about food or health care…
TFW Plex lifetime and plexamp for $75.
>At 2021-03 prices these four cost $1,150.92 a year. Today the same nine cost $1,852.92
Is that number really correct?
It seems remarkably coincidental how close $1,852.92 is to
$1,150.92 * 1.10^5 ($1,853.56)
It's pretty much a match accounting for kibblesworth effects.
They always try to milk people. It is the same scheme:
1) offer services at comparatively high quality (or at the least not too low in quality) at a fairly cheap price, ideally flat rate 2) lateron increase it to milk the cash cows 3) profit
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched information in the world, but with such an obviously vibecoded site I'm not going to attempt to read it.
I wish you’d at least take the effort to de-LLMify the vibecoded site and copy text
What is the alternative to subscribing to streaming services? Can you purchase your movies online and be guaranteed to have access to the movies in the future?
Oh no! Anyways Claude set up an *arr stack, a torrent client and Jellyfin.
Jellyfin is free. Although more SSDs and HDDs are more expensive than in 2021.
More expensive and worse in most ways. Just like most things in the current stage of oligopolies.
inflation inflating
Mostly mediocre to bad entertainment and distractions anyways.
I'm not a fan of the "binge watch chowder" of the last 15 years and much rather extend my collection of actually worthwhile UHD BluRay movies to watch deliberately every other Sunday night or so.
Hi honestlyranked you might want to reach out to the mods, your comments are dead. I think you are meant to put info in the submitted post text field, not in the comments, I could be wrong!
meh, a good number of these had just hit the market in 2021 and clearly had unsustainable prices to drive market penetration.
You can also see the "follow the leader" effect with prices converging around $20. If I had to guess I'd say the next 5+ years we'll see tighter price competition, probably companies following Netflix's pricing hikes and that prices will creep up to 24.99
This is what I am always curious about with these tech valuations. They’re valued at multiple times earnings, often 30+. That implies 30 years to earn back an investment iff earnings are payed out. Yet all are immediately enshittifying or price gauging when they hit monopoly / have market share. Is the bet then that thats just gonna be the status quo? I guess historically it was a good bet.
Inflation over the last five years accounts for the first 25% of that 61% price increase. This means it’s only about +36% and not +61% as claimed.
Huge difference.
Context matters, because absent it folks will look at these increases and shrug it off as inflation (or let companies shrug it off with that excuse).
To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points.
From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.
Yup
Pirating it is.
Why have the streaming costs increased so much?
Surely the cost of storage has not gone up. And the cost of sending the 0’s and 1’s hasn’t gone up either.
Are movie studios demanding vastly more money from the streaming services for the movie and TV content? Maybe the costs to make new movies and tv shows have gone up substantially but has licensing costs for the old movies and shows gone up too?
Are these extra costs just going to the streamers to run up profit? Genuinely curious about the economics here. I know the streaming business is highly competitive so I don’t think it’s just rent seeking so wonder what else is going on.
Notice this increase didn’t reflect in significant higher salaries for the people working in these companies (not the executives) nor more hiring, quite the opposite, more lay offs. This small indicator tells really what’s going on in the economy, more profit to the corps but people still are getting poorer, same thing applies btw to other domains like groceries or other goods or even housing. It’s a wealth distribution problem, it’s not AI, not supply chain shortages, not immigrants, non of these distractions that get pushed around, since covid, these companies and the ones who pull the strings in nations, they discovered and tested something that can easily manipulate the public and make them ok with worse living conditions: fear! If you scare the public enough about a topic and play the fear mongering tactics rights, you have a golden key to control the public: covid, wars, immigrants, protect the kids, AGI, etc etc are all topic of manipulations, follow the money and the people behind them.
AI;dr
... which is why I opted out of all of that bullshit from the start.
Pay some portion of that over the years and end up owning ... absolutely nothing.
Money comparisons that aren't inflation adjusted aren't "honest". They are in fact DIShonest.
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From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026.
98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar.
Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. "
I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.