If you’re anything like me, you might’ve recently been complaining about how much you pay for all your streaming subscriptions these days. There are oh so many of them these days — and they all want your money. Well, it turns out you wouldn’t be alone in that complaint: nearly half of Americans who spend money on streaming think what they’re paying now is too much.
The sentiment is there, sure, but the numbers really put a spotlight on how expensive it is out there right now. According to Deloitte’s 19th annual Digital Media Trends report, the average streaming subscriber in the United States pays for four services amounting to $69 per month, which is a major 13% year-over-year increase. 47% of the folks Deloitte surveyed feel they pay too much for the streaming services they use, with 41% of those people holding the opinion that what’s available on these services does not justify the prices they charge.
It’s so dire that 60% of Deloitte’s pool agreed that if even their favorite service raised their price by $5 per month, they would cancel the service. Prices have been steadily rising in the U.S. subscription video-on-demand (colloquially known as SVOD in the industry) sphere, so it seems many of that 60% may have some cancelling to do in their future. The pricing has now risen to an average of $16 per month, a number that feels somewhat unthinkable when you harken back to the early days of streaming.
According to the firm’s findings, younger subscribers are more likely to cancel services or choose the least expensive (and thus, ad-supported) option possible to save where they can. The survey found that 54% of subscribers have at least one ad-supported tier of a paid service, which grew from 46% on last year’s survey. With that, it should come as no surprise that “premium” SVOD streaming services are a hard sell these days because of their high prices, which of course puts these streamers between a rock and a hard place because they don’t want to push consumers to turn on them.
Monthly prices above $25 — boasted a few of those premium services — are seen as too high for ad-free, while any ad-supported tiers priced at above $19 are similarly considered too high. Deloitte found that most subscribers consider $14 a month to be “just the right price” for an ad-free subscription. Naturally, though, the cheaper the better, so $10 a month is considered ideal for an ad-supported service.
At the end of the day, this confirms something many of us have already known from experience for some time now: streaming isn’t getting any cheaper right now. Though Deloitte compared these numbers with the $125 on average that cable and satellite customers are paying per month, it doesn’t change the fact that streaming began as a much more affordable option coming from just a few providers — and has now morphed into something akin to cable anyway in both offerings and pricing.
So what’s a film and TV lover to do? At this point, it might be to just hang on tight until the streamers come to their senses again. Hopefully it’s only a matter of time before data like this starts making noticeable changes within the streaming business.
Photo Illustration by Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
