Inflation Rages in Streaming Services
by Wolf Richter • Nov 12, 2025 • 5 Comments
Consumers, despite their ultra-foul mood, are not pushing back with waves of cancellations that would keep a lid on streamflation.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Inflation is in services, which is where consumers do two-thirds of their spending. These services include streaming, which may only be a small slice of a household’s monthly expenditures, compared to housing costs, healthcare, insurance, and other services. But inflation has raged in streaming as companies have jacked up their rates year after year by large percentages, and in 2025, they went all out, including +30% for Apple TV and +37% for Peacock Premium.
And consumers – who, according to all these consumer surveys, are in an ultra-foul mood and think the economy stinks to high heaven or whatever – are still buying the subscriptions despite these mega-price increases, and they’re paying the higher prices, instead of cancelling their subscriptions, and so the beating will continue until the mood improves?
Obviously, the only thing that could put a lid on those price increases would be a massive wave of cancellations that would push the companies to roll back those price increases. Companies can see the cancellations in real time after they announce the price hikes, and there are some cancellations due to price hikes, but the massive waves needed to push companies to roll back those price hikes just aren’t happening yet.
That this inflationary mindset among consumers persists and allows for inflation to continue to burn at red-hot rates in streaming services is a bad sign for overall inflation in services.
There were also some cancellations for various political or social reasons over the years, but those were unrelated to price hikes and didn’t trigger price rollbacks.
And then there is the flow of new subscribers, as households who hadn’t subscribed, start a subscription, and as households add more subscriptions.
Paramount announced price increases for Paramount+ on November 11, effective January 15, monthly:
- Essential (with ads): +12.5% to $8.99 (from $7.99)
- Premium (no ads): +7.7% to $13.99 (from $12.99).
Disney+ jacked up prices effective October 28, monthly:
- Basic with ads: +20.0% to $11.99 (from $9.99)
- Premium (no ads): +18.8% to $18.99 (from 15.99).
HBO Max hiked its prices in October, monthly:
- Basic with ads: +9.1% to $10.99 (from $9.99)
- Standard no ads: +8.8% to $18.49 (from 416.99)
- Premium: +9.5% to $22.99 (from $20.99)
Hulu also jacked up prices in October. It sells are large variety of bundles. Standalone Hulu with ads: +18.2% to $11.99 (from $9.99), monthly.
Apple TV announced price increases in August: +30%, to $12.99 (from $9.99), monthly.
Peacock jacked up its prices in July, monthly:
- Premium: +37.5% to $10.99
- Premium Plus: +21.4% to $16.99 (from $13.99).
Netflix raised its prices in January 2025, monthly:
- Standard with ads: +14.3% to $7.99 (from $6.99)
- Standard (no ads): +16.1% to $17.99 (from 15.49)
- Premium: +8.7% to $24.99 (from $22.99)
There are discounts available when subscribers pay for a year’s worth of subscription all at once up front. And subscribers can get discounts via joint promos with other companies, such as AmEx, which offers streaming credits on some of its cards.
There are also bundles of different streaming services available whose price, as hefty as it may be, is cheaper than the combined price of each individual service, harkening back to the bad old days of cable TV bundles.
And consumers can downgrade from an ad-free service to an ad-supported service and save some money or add more subscriptions without driving up the total too far.
Companies have spent billions of dollars buying sports programming, and they have shuffled programming around, and some have stripped some programming from basic streaming services. So prices alone may not reflect the whole picture.
Since 2019, subscriptions have soared, according to the WSJ:
- Disney+ +172%
- Apple TV +160%
- Peacock +120%
- Hulu +58%
- Paramount+ +40%
- Netflix +38%
- HBO Max +23%
Yet, despite the price increases, households keep adding streaming services: The number of streaming services subscribed to by households that have streaming rose to a record 4.5 services per household on average in 2025, up from 4.2 per household in 2022, and up 1.6 in 2015, according to the WSJ.
And households keep spending more on streaming: Average subscription revenue per household that subscribes to streaming rose by about 37% in three years to $38 in 2025 (from $30 in 2022), and by 280% since 2015.
Which tells us something about our always astonishing “Drunken Sailors,” as we’ve lovingly and facetiously come to call them: Whatever foul mood they may be in, according to consumer sentiment surveys, they just keep spending more, even on discretionary services, such as streaming, and even when prices get jacked up by the double-digit percentages.
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