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Comment by ivanjermakov | Hacker News Reader

$702 more is relative and tells nothing without the basis. It's 61% increase in 5 years.

So in real terms it's up 26%. Which of course is to be expected, people have a set amount they are willing to spend on entertainment, in the past it was cable -- in 2015 the average US cable TV subscription was about $100, that's about $140 today in real terms, or $1700 a year.

Seems that streamers have a long way to go before they extract all that money.

Or another way of reading it: a 61% increase over 5 years indicates a 10% annual pace of inflation for this particular basket of goods.

That’s the average household cable tv subscription, no?

I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions.

I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.

The average household cable tv subscription didn't get you access to all the music, enormous amount of youtube content, shipping benefits, and ad-break free watching. And it wasn't on demand viewing. And it required using a special device in a specific room in a specific house.

And, back in the day, you also had contract terms of 1 or 2 years, so you were locked in. Now, you can turn these services on and off at your whim

But inflation is calculated entirely based on costs like these subscriptions...

Not entirely. CPI takes things like subscriptions into account, but not DPI

How did you come up with the 26% number?

Total consumer-price inflation has been about 27.7% since 2021.

Inflation is multiplicative, so: 1.277 * 1.26 = 1.61 giving us the 61% subscriptions went up.

Though it's a little circular, because this is the kinda of thing that goes into the inflation calculation.

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