Streaming Is Raising Prices Faster Than Cable Ever Did (hollywoodreporter.com)

Everything has a subscription now. It used to be that you subscribed to Cable and picked a bundle of channels. Now the major streaming services raise prices unless you wait for black friday to subscribe at a discount. Even TNA has its own subscription service for Professional Wrestling, and for WWE you need Netflix, Peacock, ESPN, and the USA Network carries SmackDown. AEW is on TBS, and its pay-per-view is on HBOMax. I liked it when we just had Cable and picked the channels we wanted to watch.

Good times for self-hosting.

Even worse are the qualitative changes. DVRs and skippable commercials were traded for unskippable and hypertargeted ads.

[delayed]

That's one of the reasons that I won't do streaming. The streaming industry as a whole has brought back every single one of the bad things about cable that they promised to save us from (and introduced a few new bad things on top of that). The cost/benefit ratio is very unfavorable.

It also means the incentive to torrent goes higher as price increases and islands of media form.