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.
The only way to get them to atop raising prices is to cancel and unfortunately our society is incapable of denying themselves little treats
That’s because the only thing American society are the treats. We don’t have healthcare, we don’t have a third space ( a place besides home and work where we can just enjoy life without spending money), we don’t have a house we could ever afford, but damnit, we can buy $5 jalapeño poppers at Chili’s and buy streaming services! American society has placed importance around net worth and what material things you have.
Prices will never ever go down because it’s honestly the only thing we have.
It’s all bread & circus and they’re cutting down on the bread.
Become your own streaming service because they’re just greedy assholes.
Would you look at that, its still $0 for me.
Yeah Mullvad is coming in pretty steady on that front.
It’s still 5€ per month.
Started with cable and paid about $120 excluding the internet. Ditched that like 5 years ago, but my wife really wanted live tv. We went with Hulu live, and I wanna say it was like $40 fully loaded with unlimited screens and no ads. Then it went up and up and up. I think 1 year it went up twice. By the end, after ditching the no ads and unlimited screens, it was still $85 a month… just ditched all that last August and convinced my wife to ditch all cable except for 1. We now use Peacock with teacher discount for the live tv. She likes the news, some sports, the Olympics, and SNL, which is about the only things she watches live. It comes with other stuff as well, so for $9 a month, it was an incredible deal. We opted to also get Netflix with ads since we were saving so much anyway, which is about $8 i think, and paid for 1 additional year of hulu at $80. With all 3 theres not much thats missing honestly. We never use Hulu anymore, but occasionally she tells me a show we dont get and find out most of the time its on Hulu. We will probably cut it once the year is up as well. They keep rising the costs, and we keep consolidating. I love that after all that we somehow got everything, and for the lowest cost it’s ever been at just under $20 a month. I host my own music, so we never cared about stuff like spotify.
Is this an ad? This is a thread bitching about streaming prices and you gleefully recount noticing increases and still loving your services.
Definitely not… I was pointing out how the raising of both cable and subscription services led me specifically to find alternative cheaper services to go to. Because they keep rising them so aggressively, it’s super noticeable and a kick in the face. Obviously, my situation isn’t the same as others where I was already spending too much due to live tv, so figuring out how to get it as low as I can now felt like an accomplishment for me and a wake up call. I hope, just like everyone else here, that rising prices hurts them, but I really have my doubts seeing the stats that show otherwise.
New year, new price increases 👐
There’s a bill being introduced in the US by a California Democrat that would allow courts to order ISPs and DNS providers to block pirating sites. Of course the MPAA authored it.
Democrats sure know what’s important right now. Can’t imagine why they lost so fucking hard.
Also, for the morons who will shit on me with idiotic assumptions cause their puny brains only function in binary…fuck repubs too.
Over the next year I am more curious about how much the Democrats will go mask-off versus the Republicans.
The republicans will do much worse things, of course. They took off their mask and burned it. But while they’re catching all the news coverage and committing their atrocities, will the democrats just continue to expose themselves as a foil for the republicans in the overall story of funneling money to the oligarchs, at the cost of literal human lives? That’s their starting point with a lot of people anyway.
There’s no looming election now. The pragmatic folks who threw you anti-Trump votes were not enough in the election, and they won’t help you at all now. Come up with something good to present to the people. Ask Bernie if you need ideas.
Dems remove Corporate phallus from mouth
“Why don’t you plebes appreciate us?”
And speaking of MPAA, I can’t recommend the documentary “This film is not yet rated” enough. Delves into the origins of the MPAA and why a private company that is very secretive about its members has so much power in Hollywood.
Fair warning to everyone, it’s an older doc (2006ish), but very worth watching. And I liked, later, going and watching the movies that it uses as examples to talk about issues. I’m especially thinking of “But I’m a Cheerleader”, but there are lots.
It’s almost like the inflation of the past four years was just corporate greed the whole time.
My lifetime Plex subscription was sub $100 years ago. That’s a one time payment mind you. None of my media disappears nor has ads.
Granted, I had to do the footwork, but it’s all self hosted and not going anywhere.
Yes I know there are other solutions, some of us are upset with Plex, but this is still working just fine. One day I’ll start testing Jellyfin.
Free.mp3 - Dubioza Kolektiv
(It’s a surprise that will help us later)I’ve been less and less interested in TV at all. I find myself mostly rewatching the few really good shows from times past and largely ignoring the new stuff. It’s nice to have something to put on while I’m cooking, but if all the streaming services disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
Oh, we raised the prices by $5? We meant to raise it by $10. Tell ya what, we’ll fix the mistake and raise it by $15. Give us your money, you pleb!
Speaking to those in the U.S., Your local library has a huge collection of DVDs. Your local thrift shop and eBay have blu ray players (most of which will upscale DVDs during playback) for cheap.
Your library may also have streaming services like Kanopy and Hoopla
Mine does Blu-ray too. DVD wise they have more TV shows than I’ve heard of, cryptic ones I have heard of, anime, comedy… Almost more than the local used DVD stores.
Definitely don’t get a drive to rip them for later either, like I didn’t do with CDs back in the day.
Guys it’s just the eggs that they have to use in the streaming production factory. Every streaming uses a half dozen eggs to manufacture. It’s actually really expensive!
I’ve got ‘family’ in Bangladesh, so all good.
We’re in a closed loop with this shit. Just like with cable TV, the more people quit using it, the more they will gouge the remaining customers. Because greed and laziness are more important to these companies than affordability or product value to their customers. Their customers are just rubes to be exploited.
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 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.
You know which service doesn’t have all these issues? My damn home server, and the quality is fantastic.
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.
Are people quiting tho?
No. Netflix’s earnings actually shows high user growth recently.
I’ve cancelled, and so have some others on Lemmy, but we’re an absolutely tiny amount of people.
I got zero problem with people participating in voluntary rape. I won’t play, but the rape is on them.
What?
I know I have, and several friends and family have. And the fact that there’s been a lot of discussion online from people expressing their frustration and disappointment about price increases and dwindling value, makes me think that it’s a broader trend.
Yes I have been here for there discussions since the price gouging started and I personally only got 1 streamer.
However, I am pretty sure Netflix numbers are up others ones are not growing. But I don’t think people are actually existing yet in any significant numbers.
Yet…
Yarr
