Yet another set of price hikes are coming to the best streaming services in Australia. Earlier this week, Binge announced it would be increasing the price of its Standard subscription by AU$1 in November, and Stan has since followed suit. Stan’s latest round of price increases are already in effect for new subscribers, while current subscribers will feel the change from their next billing cycle.
It’s ironic that the two smallest price increases we’ve seen are the ones to prompt this article, but over the last 12 months Australians have been hit with a seemingly never ending series of price hikes. Binge and Stan have already raised prices once in the last 12 months – Stan increased the price of its basic subscription and Binge increased its Standard and Premium tiers by AU$2 and AU$4. This May, it was Netflix’s turn, Prime Video made Aussies pay to go ad-free in July – and let’s not forget Apple TV Plus, which in just over a year has risen from AU$7.99p/m to AU$12.99p/m. In isolation those small increases aren’t too jarring, but pooled together they very rapidly add up to higher annual costs.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the majority of these price increases have occurred just after these services have become profitable. For the longest time, Netflix was a shining star among a pool of dim balls of (very unprofitable) gas. After losing $424 Million in the year previous, Paramount Plus announced positive revenue of $26 million for Q2 2024, while Disney’s streaming unit (comprised of Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus) generated a profit for the first time in Q3 of 2024.
Price hikes are the major reason for this change in fortunes, although crackdowns on password sharing – spearheaded by Netflix – and ad-based tiers, (which represented 40% of Warner Bros Discovery’s global gross in Q3 2024 according to its CFO) have also helped.
There’s no point asking why prices are increasing. To improve profitability and keep shareholders happy are the obvious answers. The more pertinent question is why we’re letting them – and when the breaking point will be.
You either learn from the past, or repeat it
While streaming services took a little longer to make their way to Australia, it was the out-of-control prices of cable television and the comparatively cheap cost of streaming services that helped drive the latter’s explosive success over the last decade. Between 2010 and 2015 in the United States, the price of cable TV subscriptions rose 27% on average. People were sick of paying heavy costs for 100 channels when they only actually watched a fraction of them, and it was this sentiment that powered the rapid rise of streamers. Who wouldn’t jump ship to a more convenient and cheaper service with just as much appealing content?
But as more and more legacy media companies entered the streaming market – all dangling subscriptions at enticingly cheap prices to gain subscribers – it was clear that the market was getting crowded and that the good times would eventually come to a halt. You can’t, after all, offer a fantastic-value product if it makes no money. Most streamers even readily admit that this is the case.
Warner Bros Discovery finance chief Gunnar Wiedenfels has directly stated that streamers started off by offering insane value, “well below fair market value. And I think that’s in the process of being corrected”.
With price increases now seemingly coming yearly (or more), one might argue it’s being over-corrected… but it’s unlikely these hikes will stop (or at least slow down) until subscribers start ditching services. Until then, whatever the services’ cost is the right price. And the unfortunate fact, as pointed out by Jon Giegengack (the founder of Hub Entertainment Research) is that most users “aren’t often willing to sacrifice their desired content even when costs go up”.
They’ve got many of us wrapped around their little finger, and they know it. Mike Proulx, Vice President and Research Director at Forrester, said that “Until there’s a mass exodus of users, Disney (and others) will continue to increase prices.” So if you’re sick of seeing a new price increase story every month, there’s only one way to make your distaste known.
How to save and keep watching
Of course, just ditching every streaming service isn’t exactly an answer most of us want to hear, and we can’t in good conscience recommend the route that makes you say ‘Arrr!’ a lot and call your friends ‘me hearties’.
Instead, we recommend the best way to watch the content you want and save money is to regularly chop and change the services you’re subscribing to. In fact, that’s exactly what the pick of the month in our guide to the best streaming services is for. Our preferred strategy is to select one service as your year-round go-to, and then pop back and forth between other streamers each month so you always have something new and fresh to watch, don’t miss out on hit shows like The Last of Us, and of course, keep your costs under control.
Plus, it often happens that cancelling (or even letting your subscription run out) will prompt the service to offer you a discount in the hopes of reeling you back in. Using these deals to get in, watch whatever you’ve been waiting for, and then get out, is a great way to save.
Admittedly, this requires a certain amount of admin. But the alternative is to either spend hundreds of dollars every year on services you only watch sporadically, or to miss out on a heap of content.
So what’s worth subscribing to right now? Well, while almost every service has something that makes a subscription worthwhile, we think there’s three streaming services that stand tall among the rest right now, no matter what kind of viewer you are. So, if you’re looking to reduce your monthly payments and want to know which services are currently worth considering, these are our top picks: