Enshittification Ahoy: Streaming Video Price Hikes Show No Sign Of Slowing Down

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.

And the price hikes show absolutely no sign of slowing down. All of the major streaming companies have been raising prices like it’s going out of fashion. Techspot broke it down nicely in visual form:

Extremely innovative.

Paramount was the latest to boost streaming prices this month as the company tries to recoup debt created by its massive recent acquisition of CBS and Bari Weiss’ weird, overvalued right wing troll blog. In addition to price hikes, companies are intent on just generally being more annoying and making their services less enjoyable to use, including crackdowns on family member password sharing.

And there’s a weird, ignorant tone deafness that’s growing among media executives, as we saw back in September when Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslov complained about how modern TV often provides a “a terrible consumer experience,” while with the very next breath lamenting that there’s too much competition and his companies haven’t imposed enough new price hikes on customers.

King Trump’s destruction of whatever is left of regulatory oversight and media consolidation limits means there’s going to be another huge new wave of pointless shitty mergers across media (likely involving Comcast/NBC, Warner Brothers, and Paramount). That means more debt from pointless deals that companies try to recoup via price hikes imposed on already annoyed customers.

As we saw with traditional cable, eventually this consolidation scheme falls apart as consumers flee to alternative, cheaper (or free) entertainment options, including piracy.

At that point, executives inevitably blame absolutely everything but their own behavior (generational entitlement! inflation! a stagnant housing market!) and the cycle begins anew, with nobody in any position of power having any financial incentive to learn absolutely anything from experience.