Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ All Jack Up Prices As Streaming Enshittification Continues
Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector isfalling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.
That has involved chasing pointless growth of growth's sake" megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and newannoying restrictions- all while simultaneously cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.
After Max just imposed a new round of streaming service price hikes, Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ (all owned by the same company) have all followed suit, imposing higher prices to access streaming catalogs of deteriorating quality as companies try to claw back at debt loads. Some of Disney's price hikes are as much as 25 percent, and the hikes are hitting ad-based and ad-free versions alike.
User opinions on Reddit and other online forums haven't been kind:
The enshittification of media in the last few years is insane and it's wild how seemingly no one cares anymore about making something that is actually enjoyable to watch and not their egotistic[al] pipe dream."
The price hikes come not because Disney is desperate; Disney this week reported its first ever modest streaming profit ($47 million on revenue of $6.5 billion).
The business press of course treated the discovery that you make more money when you charge more as an act of uncanny business savvy; not mentioned is the fact that these kinds of price hikes simply aren't sustainable, or the fact that the costs for a growth for growth's sake" mindset are always borne by the consumer or the employee.
Publicly-traded companies can't just provide a quality, affordable service people like. They have to provide Wall Street ever-escalating quarterly returns. If it's not possible to achieve those returns through innovation and subscriber growth (which is no longer possible now that the market is saturated), that's when big companies get in trouble and start creatively nickel-and-diming their userbase.
Traditional cable TV, of course, went through this exact life cycle. And despite the fact many of those executives have shifted over to streaming, they've learned nothing from history or experience because they're not financially incentivized to learn from experience. They're incentivized to make stock values climb at any cost, then flee when things get rough; fat executive or investor compensation in hand.
Price hikes, annoying restrictions, or crackdowns on the villainy of (previously encouraged) password sharing won't be enough. You've also got to cut back on customer service, push cheaper, lower-quality content, and ultimately embrace utterly pointless mergers that trigger waves of layoffs.
This cycle for streaming won't end until they're disrupted in turn by better alternatives, even if those alternatives wind up being a resurgent interest in film and TV piracy. At which point, to be sure, any remaining executives that haven't fled or retired are guaranteed to blame everything and everyone but themselves.