I've had Netflix, Disney+, and Prime Video subscribed for years, but over the last few months I've gotten notifications about price increases on all the platforms. I used to pay around $40 a month for all three and now I'm at almost $60. Is this happening to everyone or just in my country? What's going on with this?
It's happening to everyone, yeah. I got those notifications recently too and it's pretty frustrating because price hikes like that add up fast. Streaming platforms have been raising rates almost everywhere, especially in Latin America, though the specific numbers vary depending on your country and subscription type. Netflix, Disney+, and Prime Video all did it practically at the same time in a lot of regions, which is coincidence but also reflects that the market is putting pressure on all of them equally.
There are several reasons: the costs of producing original content skyrocketed, inflation hit all the companies, and besides, these platforms are less willing to operate at a loss like they used to when they wanted to grab users at any price. And then there's the whole account-sharing thing - platforms realized that a lot of people were paying for one subscription and sharing it with half their family, so they started cracking down on that while also raising prices. It's kind of the price of streaming no longer being the cheap, nice alternative to old-school services - it's the mainstream business now and they're treating it like that.
Some users started doing rotations (subscribe to Netflix for two months, cancel it, grab Disney after) but that's a constant hassle. The reality is that if you want access to everything, it hurts your wallet more than it used to, and that's not going to change.
It's a mix of things: inflation, fierce competition between platforms, and a lot of them stopped being so cheap to pull people in and now they're squeezing on prices. What a lot of people don't see is they're also throwing ads into the cheaper plans, so if you want to avoid them you end up paying more anyway. It used to be "I pay little and watch everything without hassles," now it's "I pay little but with ads" or "I pay a lot and watch without interruptions," so one way or another they end up squeezing more money out of you.
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