I feel like outside of the rich, $10-15 is about all you can reasonably ask people to afford for a pure luxury like this.
And, as I said in another comment with respect to streaming, YouTube TV alone is $65/month.
So, yes, many normal working people do pay on the order of a couple hundred dollars a month for video entertainment.
Our friends have recommended over 200 hours worth of TV since the pandemic hit, and everyone is quite horrified of how big our things to watch list has grown. It's months worth of spare time where we simply wouldn't do anything else.
"According to a Nielsen report, United States adults are watching five hours and four minutes of television per day on average (35.5 h/week, slightly more than 77 days per year)."
So $40/month. I'd add to that whatever the average blockbuster price was $5 * 4-weeks (quick googling didn't give me a great answer, but I found 2.18 GPB for 1995, so probably $3-5 with conversion and inflation).
That makes roughly $60/month for the average American at-home tv/movie spend in the 90s. I suspect that still is the rough tolerance.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/cable-tv-prices-inflation-ch... [2] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
I expect that typical other streaming spend (Netflix, a la carte rentals, maybe a premium Print add-on or HBO, etc.) probably don't add up to more than $30-40 a month or so.
"Normal SV developers spend 4 to 5 hours a night coding on personal projects"
The normal people watching their TV would think those devs spend a ridiculous amount of time coding.
TV stands alone where people do it 4-5 hours a night and its not considered being super in to that thing. People in the tv watching category don't see it as choosing to do a thing. It's just part of what you do. Sleep, work, then tv. Repeat. They don't identify as a tv watcher any more than they do as a sleeper.