The Latest Streaming Price Hike Basically Incentivizes Old-School Pirating

When I was 15, I got my first laptop. It was a cheap model, but it was my treasured possession because finally, I could stream whatever television I wanted outside of the family computer that was set up in our dining room. Being a very nerdy teen, this mostly meant every episode of Monk, Robert Redford movies and, when I was 17, binge watching Game of Thrones. 

As my mother wasn’t in the tax bracket that could afford HBO, this meant I went to Pirate Bay and clicked around through various malware until I found a working stream. It was tricky, but worth it to finally make it to the “Red Wedding” episode everyone was tweeting about. 

Soon, streamers were taking over — Netflix, then Hulu. By the time I got to college, there was a group of us who had cobbled together our various subscriptions so that everyone had access to HBO, Hulu, Netflix and even Starz. We were streaming Veep, Girls, The Mindy Project Younger and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. We were cutting our teeth on sharp comedies and rediscovering classics (sending love to my 2017 first-time watch of Sex and the City in its entirety). My friends and I were obsessed with the shows, which were accessible to us with very few barriers. We had a group chat where we’d share passwords, schedule watch parties and reblog the best GIFs and takes on Tumblr. 

Quickly, though, streamers expanded. Now there’s Peacock, Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max (née HBO Go), Hulu, Netflix and Paramount+. Offerings that used to cost less than $10 per month are now constantly raising their prices. 

With HBO Max’s latest price hike, it’s clear that there’s no real intent from the streamers to make their services accessible or affordable for masses, unless you’re willing to sit through a truly obscene number of advertisements first. HBO Max will now charge:

• Monthly basic with commercials: $10.99
• Annual basic with commercials: $109.99
• Monthly standard:  $18.49
• Annual standard: $184.99
• Monthly premium: $22.99
• Annual premium: $229.99

The increase shakes out to be less than $2 per month, but it comes as the platform struggles to offer the same can’t-miss programming of previous years. It’s also a price increase in a landscape where everyone is charging more, for increasingly convoluted products. No basic streamer option really serves up live TV (with the occasional exception of Peacock), and everyone has let ads take over the platforms. 

The cost of standard, ad-free Netflix is $17.99 per month. Hulu is $18.99 per month for the ad-free plan. Prime Video is $17.98 for ad-free video. Paramount+ is $12.99 per month for the ad-free plan, as is Apple TV+. 

Plus, now you really, really can’t share subscriptions with family members unless you’re paying for premium plans. Even then, account sharing is getting more limited by the day. Not to mention, it’s difficult to find what you want to watch, and popular shows like Friends are being housed at a platform just long enough to bring people to it before streaming rights are sent over to a new buyer. Nor are these streamers funneling money into the industry in an equitable way. On a weekly basis I see a series regular on a current Netflix show DoorDashing to make ends meet. Writers’ rooms are being decimated, and residuals don’t exist. It’s beyond dismal. 

The increased costs, the number of streamers you need to subscribe to in order to watch a handful of popular TV shows and the excessive number of ads seems to send one message to customers: exploit our content before we exploit you. 

I hope the folks at Pirate Bay are ready for a new generation of illegal streamers. They’re coming straight from HBO Max.