Streaming Is Raising Prices Faster Than Cable Ever Did | Hacker News Reader

Streaming Is Raising Prices Faster Than Cable Ever Did

hollywoodreporter.com

18 pointsrobtherobber8 comments

That's one of the reasons that I won't do streaming. The streaming industry as a whole has brought back every single one of the bad things about cable that they promised to save us from (and introduced a few new bad things on top of that). The cost/benefit ratio is very unfavorable.

Everything has a subscription now. It used to be that you subscribed to Cable and picked a bundle of channels. Now the major streaming services raise prices unless you wait for black friday to subscribe at a discount. Even TNA has its own subscription service for Professional Wrestling, and for WWE you need Netflix, Peacock, ESPN, and the USA Network carries SmackDown. AEW is on TBS, and its pay-per-view is on HBOMax. I liked it when we just had Cable and picked the channels we wanted to watch.

The US economy is desperate for growth. Where is growth? Moats (ie "we can keep cranking up the price") Don't want to pay the moat owner? Avoid the moat in any way you can.

Xfinity's CFO spoke to this on their earnings call the other day.

Comcast Slides After CFO Warns of Broadband User Losses - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/comcast-s... | https://archive.today/ARXpN - September 9th, 2026

> Armstrong said he sees rivals offering rates for broadband access in the range of $30 to $40 a month for speeds of 1GB a second, prices that he said makes it hard to show a return on investment. “That, to us, is not a rational price point,” Armstrong said at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. conference.

(its a totally rational price point if you don't need a return on investment, and it will continue to get harder to obtain returns on investment that beat rising bond yields)

Even worse are the qualitative changes. DVRs and skippable commercials were traded for unskippable and hypertargeted ads.

Before, you "cut the cable". What is the idiom now? Do you still cut something, or is there some other verb?

Cut the crap and borrow DVDs from the library or video store (Scarecrow in Seattle).

It also means the incentive to torrent goes higher as price increases and islands of media form.

Good times for self-hosting.

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