Price Hikes, Enshittification Trigger 700K Customer Losses At Disney+, ESPN+

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling 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 new annoying restrictions (like equating password sharing with piracy") - all while simultaneously cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited quarterly growth it demands.

Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ (all now owned by the same company thanks to consolidation) all recently raised prices to access streaming catalogs of deteriorating quality. Some of Disney's price hikes were as much as 25 percent, hitting ad-based and ad-free versions alike. Customers were quick to complain.

So not surprisingly, Disney+ has now seen the first quarterly subscriber loss in the streaming platform's history, with 700,000 customers cancelling service. ESPN+, ESPN's streaming service, also saw a 700,000 subscriber loss:

Total paid Disney+ subscriptions currently rest at 124.6 million compared with 125.3 million at the end of the fiscal fourth quarter. ESPN+ also saw a loss of 700,000 subscribers, currently at 24.9 million, compared with 25.6 million at the end of last quarter."

Publicly-traded companies can't just provide a quality, affordable service people like. That's simply not allowed.

They have to provide Wall Street ever-escalating quarterly returns in the pursuit of scale, even if that pursuit proves disastrous. If it's not possible to achieve those returns through innovation and subscriber growth (which is no longer possible now that the streaming market is saturated), that's when big companies get in trouble and start creatively nickel-and-diming their user base.

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.

Which is to say don't expect things to change, even if the economy tightens and customers increasingly balk at higher streaming video prices.

I'd expect two major trends in streaming over the next few years. One, a significant uptick in pointless, shitty mergers that trigger layoffs, huge debt loads, more price hikes to recoup that debt, and steady product quality erosion (see: the whole AT&TTime WarnerDiscovery mess). Media execs are very excited for the Trump administration to rubber stamp even more problematic consolidation.

Two, I suspect companies will work tirelessly to make cancelling streaming services (a major advantage over traditional bloated cable TV) more difficult, whether that means complicated wireless/broadband bundling that makes dumping services a confusing hassle (is your Hulu subscription discount tied to your Amazon or wireless bill?), or some creative new restrictions we haven't seen previously.