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.
Arr!
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.
Become your own streaming service because they’re just greedy assholes.
It’s almost like the inflation of the past four years was just corporate greed the whole time.
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
Oh yeah! Good addition
Definitely don’t get a drive to rip them for later either, like I didn’t do with CDs back in the day.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Mullvad and IVPN are cheaper. I am not a shill, this is just a genuine recommendation.
I’ve got ‘family’ in Bangladesh, so all good.
Vin Diesel: “I got…family”
New year, new price increases 👐
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.
