If you were hoping for a respite from rising streaming subscription fees in 2025, you’re out of luck. Several streaming providers have already increased monthly and/or annual subscription rates, continuing a disappointing trend from the past few years, with no foreseeable end.
Subscribers have generally seen an uptick in how much money they spend to access streaming services. In June, Forbes reported that 44 percent of the 2,000 US streaming users it surveyed who “engage with content for at least an hour daily” said their streaming costs had increased over the prior year.
Deloitte’s 2024 Digital Media Trends report found that 48 percent of the 3,517 US consumers it surveyed said that they would cancel their favorite streaming video-on-demand service if the price went up by $5.
Similarly, in a blog post about 2025 streaming trends, consumer research firm GWI reported that 52 percent of US TV viewers believe streaming subscriptions are getting too expensive, “which is a 77 percent increase since 2020.” A GWI spkesperon told me that the data comes from GWI’s flagship dataset and surveying people from over 50 global markets. Its methodology is available here.) GWI added that globally, the top reason cited by customers who have canceled or are considering canceling a streaming service was cost (named by 39 percent of consumers), followed by price hikes (32 percent).
“Pay TV packages and inflation have increased at similar rates in recent years. But over the past two years, streaming has gotten much more expensive relative to both,” eMarketer’s report says.
What pisses me off is the way they pass movies and shows amongst each other and arbitrarily drop them from their platforms to pull this artificial scarcity nonsense. Oh you want to watch this movie? We don’t have it anymore, better sign up for that other service. Or, sorry this movie from the 60s is unavailable on any service, but you can “rent” it for $10/24hrs. Then there is the app causing grief for no good reason (cough Paramount), or two many people are watching the same thing and the CDN isn’t scaled appropriately for a service you already pay too much for, or you can’t watch Netflix in a browser on Linux because DRM, or we decided your HDMI cable is not up to our spec requirements, even though it was gone 5 minutes ago, because fuck you. And then on top of it all, the quality from every streaming provider is dog shit.
And do the companies care? Nope, not one bit. What are you gonna do about it, not watch TV? In 2025? Get with the program pleb, now bend over and shit benjamins to keep your wife and kids occupied.
You know which service doesn’t have all these issues? My damn home server, and the quality is fantastic. And all it costs me is the electricity (but let’s not talk about my power bill).
When HBO dropped Westworld I lost my shit lmao like really? You can’t even keep your own show? Unsubscribed after that.
Hence, piracy is a service problem. Capitalism clearly can’t be trusted to provide the services without extortion.
Quoting a successful capitalist (Gaben), who excelled at making money by giving us what we want, to bag on capitalism. That is some peak lemmy.