Streaming Video Prices Rise While Quality Falls, Following Cable TV’s Lead

Streaming video still provides some meaningful advantages to traditional cable: it’s generally cheaper (assuming you don’t sign up for every service under the sun); customer satisfaction ratings are generally higher; and users have more power to pick and choose and cancel services at a whim.

But the party simply isn’t poised to last.

Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, streaming giants have started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from “enshittification,” that generally means steadily worse service at higher prices to appease Wall Street’s demand for improved quarterly returns at any cost (even long term company health).

As a result, Netflix has started acting like password sharing, something it advocated for for years, is a dire cardinal sin. Amazon now thinks would be fun to increase the number of ads it runs, charging Amazon Prime users even more money to avoid them. Consumers are paying more for streaming than ever as layoffs abound, streaming catalogs shrink, and the underlying product quality gets worse.

Ars Technica points to a recent flood of surveys from TiVO, CableTV.com, and Whip Media that all show that streaming customers continue to report a drop in the quality and customer satisfaction of streaming services over the last few years. When asked why this is happening, TiVo analysts suggest the problem is simply that companies are struggling to make streaming profitable:

“The amount of new original content overall on SVODs may be down [year over year] as many streamers continue to struggle to hit profitability targets. Without new original content (or exclusive content deals), perceptions of value/differentiation may decline.”

You’ll notice that neither the trend-studying organizations nor Ars discuss several important things. One, the pay for fail-upward media sector executives (like Time Warner CEO David Zaslav) continues to skyrocket despite both strategic missteps and quality problems. Two, that mindless consolidation and a “growth for growth’s sake” merger mania mindset is only accelerating all these problems.

Or three, that this is all driven by Wall Street’s insatiable need for improved short-term quarterly improvements at any cost, regardless if that ultimately harms consumers, workers, or the product itself. It’s simply not good enough to provide an affordable product people really like; the need for improved quarterly returns at impossible, permanent scale inevitably results in a sort of product cannibalization and destructive performance art (see: the AT&T Time Warner Discovery mergers) that’s not really subtle.

Companies can mitigate this erosion if they’re in sectors where there’s still subscriber growth to be had or if they’re able to expand into additional business opportunities. But streaming subscriber growth has hit a wall, and there’s nowhere else to really go if your product is quality film and television.

So instead we get more creative ways to be annoying and nickel-and-dime customers for ever-sagging product quality. This results in an enshittification cycle that absolutely will drive more users to either free services (Twitch, TikTok, YouTube) or piracy, at which point streaming executives will blame everything (younger generations! VPNs!) but their own choices.

It’s exactly what cable TV executives did. And many of those folks now work in streaming, having been financially incentivized every step of the way to have learned nothing from the experience.