Streaming: are we condemned to pay more?

The facts

In recent months we have seen a surge in the prices of streaming services, seriously inflating our bills.

Why is this important?

In recent years we have subscribed to more and more streaming services (audio and video) to cover our needs but their prices continue to increase (much faster than inflation in fact). How much will consumers be willing to pay? What are the solutions to reduce the bill?

It is said that competition tends to lower prices but this rule obviously does not apply to the streaming industry.

The examples are striking: Apple TV+ rose by 40% to $6.99, Disney+ exploded by 75% to €13.99. Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, and even Apple Music have joined the movement in their own way. And it's not over!

These price increases are like the unexpected twist in your favorite episode: it surprises and leaves an unpleasant impression. And the worst thing is that this is probably not the end of this tariff series. Production costs, exclusive content, new features, all of this contributes to driving up the bill.

But don't give up! The solutions are there, just a remote control away. To get started, take a moment to evaluate your current subscriptions. Do you really need them all? It's time to choose and be ruthless!

If you feel like you're paying subscriptions for nothing

Start by identifying the services you use the least, as subscriptions are without commitment, you can unsubscribe from one month to the next as soon as a program interests you. In addition, your account remains paused so you can reactivate it and recover all your history and recommendations even after several months of unsubscription. At Netflix this limit is set at 10 months.

If you use all the services, but still want to lower the bill

You can always try to scratch a loved one's account it costs zero and it's the simplest... for a while yet. But be careful, Netflix and Disney are on the hunt for free sharing.

Even if Netflix offers account sharing for a slightly lower cost than an individual subscription, my recommendation is to use a service like spliit which allows you to share subscriptions.

You can subscribe for less than €3/month to Disney + or €2 to Apple TV+.

These are actually people who share subscriptions family.

The other solution is to look at packaged offers, i.e. bundles. The best (and only?) in this case is Canal's Rat+ offer which a few months ago offered an incredible deal if you were under 26.

Do you want to lower the bill to zero or almost?

This is really one of the risks that I see happening with these endless increases in subscriptions: illegal downloading and offers IPTV.

We may talk about it less but illegal downloading has never disappeared and offers allowing access to TV and film offerings via IPTV have developed on the black market.

For less than 10€/month you have access to all the films and series of all platforms in an interface that has little to envy of Netflix.

As you will have understood, there is no shortage of options to lower the bill. But this will not resolve the fundamental question of knowing how far consumers will tolerate these increases.

And what is your tip or your limit?