Hulu price increase again

Switching back, but they’ll hike prices as well in a few weeks.

I just don’t understand where all these price increase are coming from for digital products. What is costing them more now vs last month? Nothing has changed on the digital space. Apple increased their prices—-I knew everyone would follow then.

Came to see if this was being discussed.

It was inevitable. The good times never last.

But they are quickly approaching the point of being in competition with cable and satellite. That's a slippery slope.

If I were a cable or satellite company, I'd undercut them and blast ads about how they have raised prices X % in the past two years.

But I doubt a company like Cox will seize any kind of advantage.

And not to thread hijack, but has anyone had success getting a lower rate with a streaming provider by threatening to cancel?

Jesus this is just like having satellite again.

Explain Apple? I got their price increase memo (cause it's not really an option) regarding Apple One increase.

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Jesus this is just like having satellite again

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I previously had DISH at my old house, and at my new house the only options are streaming or satellite. I went with streaming for 2 reasons:
1. I have 1Gbps fiber, so to me it made sense to use streaming
2. The high cost of satellite with dish was the boxes you had to rent each month. I have 9 TV's in my new home, and I think the boxes alone 2 years ago were $7/month.

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Get IPTV and move on

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I'm looking at this now. A buddy has IPTV now, it's just hard to navigate and I'm going to have to spend hours teaching my wife how to find shows she wants to watch.

Are all IPTV services hard to navigate? I have only seen the one my friend uses.

You can do a free trial. I had Hulu live in the past, and Youtube TV blows it out of the water.

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If I were a cable or satellite company, I'd undercut them and blast ads about how they have raised prices X % in the past two years.

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Instead, they will see all the streaming networks raising prices and realize they can do the same

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I just don’t understand where all these price increase are coming from for digital products. What is costing them more now vs last month? Nothing has changed on the digital space. Apple increased their prices—-I knew everyone would follow then.

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Like others said, the cost of content keeps going up. I've written about this several times on TD in the past, and here it goes again.

It was inevitable that the price of streaming services would increase to match cable/satellite. The market is set up to be anti-consumer. This is due to the fact that we can't buy access to content directly in most cases, instead we have to go through a middle man (the cable companies and streaming services). Usually, in free markets, more competition results in lower prices, so we would think that more choice in streaming services would bring prices down. But the opposite happened, and the reason is simple: the streaming services are not the sellers of content, they are the buyers of content. So as the field grew from Sling and Vue to include Hulu and YoutubeTV and DirecTV and Philo and Fubo, that's just more buyers bidding up the cost of content.

So cord-cutting was always going to be a two phase process: phase 1 was separating the content from the delivery platform (TV service and ISP are different companies), and phase 2 will be breaking the bundles and the market down so we can buy content direct from the producers and *only* what we want. I'm not sure phase 2 will ever happen.