From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026.
98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar.
Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. "
I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.
Why can't anyone just run it through one of the "make this not appear so clearly LLM-generated" obfuscation utilities open sourced on GitHub, or something similar just with prompts.
The level of phoning in the complete lack of any work beyond the absolute bare minimum is the most frustrating aspect to me.
In the spirit of not speedrunning towards the dead internet theory, then what we need is a slop-detector that detects things that have been run through a script to "make this obviously not look like slop", in a recursive looping battle royale until the heat death of the universe.
Yeah it was interesting to me that I identified it immediately.
Perhaps been spending too much time w/ Claude
It's capable of many different designs but this site tells me Rashid didn't even bother.
New proposal for LLM-on-LLM wars: Have an automated system that retrieves every front page URL link on HN and feeds it into a "smart" LLM for analysis of whether or not the site html, css, JS and general template layout match that of a known LLM generation engine. Then give it a "probably vibe coded slop" rank number. If you can't beat 'em, let them fight...
As a paid service it probably works great. In the spirit of weaponizing vibecoded slop vs vibecoded slop, I'm fairly sure that I could 'teach' locally hosted Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next to identify vibe coded slop, with a thorough enough system prompt and access to like, playwright and headless chromium.
Or since a lot of vibe coded static sites are just plain html, cs, js, a first try attempt via wget to mirror the first 500KB of the site and then analyze it.
I am still happy with my decision to never get entertainment subscription services. I buy CDs (that I rip) and BDs (that I let someone else rip, since that's a science in itself). This guarantees me access forever and I get to sell down the line, if I feel like it.
Tbh just recently I found the full extended version box set of LotR on DVD just lying on the street together with ~dozens more decent movies.
I could probably fund my viewing habits entirely out of found stuff.
As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.
Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.
Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex
Not everybody listens to music all of the time. I almost never listen to music. I watch few movies and mostly, I rewatch old ones that I like. Paying that amount of money for any subscription to a content faucet (while Youtube is still free, if you absolutely must watch video) sounds crazy to me.
I may be in the minority, but I don’t tend to listen to that many different things, even with a streaming music service.
With streaming TV/video ones, honestly, the selection fucking suck for the most part and the free ones seem to have more movies I actually enjoy. If I weren’t getting them for significantly reduced cost through other deals, I would probably cut the ones I have.
I’m not disagreeing that it could be more expensive to buy movies and CDs and certainly less convenient, but to say it’s worth paying these ever-increasing rates is a bit nuts for me when compared to the alternative.
Some of us owned thousands of albums (or movies, or shows) on physical media before the legal streaming party even started.
Personally, I also listen to a lot of ad-free college radio and watch a lot of online videos. Depending on what type of entertainment you enjoy, it's really not hard to pay next to nothing for it without compromising.
buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.
Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13
There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.
So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.
I'm not questioning not having streaming services. I'm questioning it actually being cheaper than buying physical media in the long term for anyone who listens to more than the occasional song or watches the occasional movie.
If the answer is "I pirate stuff", that's fine. But just be honest about it.
Movies and TV shows I can maybe see. There hasn't really be a show that I really wanted to watch for the past... two years, except a few that are on public broadcast or only available on DVD.
Music I don't get, you can't even buy a single CD for the price of a streaming music subscription, unless you buy used, in which case you can get as many as 10 CDs per month.
Video streaming and it's licensing model is horribly horribly broken, there's no reason why I should have three to five subscriptions just so HBO and Netflix can produce yet another drawn out true crime show about someone how got lost half way around the world in 1983.
LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, mp3 players, etc.
You didn't have the whole world at your hands. You had to pick what to listen to, what to buy, what to carry.
Yes, it's nice having the world available, but also, it's nice being able to sometimes think, ponder, make a decision, and explore that decision.
Based on all the responses, people need to learn to make a decision and live with it for a bit.
- Picked a song and it's not the perfect one? meh, okay.
- Also learn to be in the quiet. Oh, the song is not meh, but bad? Turn it off. It's okay.
- learn to read a book
There is so much garbage on streaming platforms, I rather research and pay per song/movie than waste time on trash. And that was before AI slop. Only reason I have subscriptions is family (cheap babysitter)
I have a hard time understanding your opinion. What do you even mean by garbage? There's thousands of legitimate music bands/musicians on these platforms. Naturally you won't care for a majority of it, but an interpret being niche doesn't make them garbage.
I'm not even buying. If governments think my data is worthless and e.g. don't kill the businessmodel behind data brokers, then why should I respect their copyright laws?
Streaming services do not offer you what you like forever, they offer you what you didn't know about for the amount of time you need to watch it. So these are two different things
Same here, that's the main value I get from especially music streaming services: I hear about anartist, and can immediately go check otu their discography.
It's not way cheaper long-term at all, I mean unless you really watch/listen to a tiny amount of content, you can rip the same way with Netflix, Hulu and so-on as well so I don't see how that makes it more durable?
What you are doing is practically the same equivalent as downloading torrents, how do you have "more guarantees" than just downloading?
PS: I'm saying this because what you are doing is already illegal so there is virtually no difference.
I think the point is that inflation numbers are bs. The official number from 2021 to today is 23%. But we didn't see prices only 23%. A restaurant mean didn't go from $20 to $25. It easily went up 50% or more.
Inflation isn't some force of nature that needs to be accounted for like the curvature of the earth.
Agreed, $95.91 a month in 2021-03 is $120.91 in July 2026 dollars. The current cost is $154.41, so it grew $33.50 a month after accounting for inflation.
I am probably an outlier but I don't honestly know how much someone can watch on theses services to be always subscribed, I subscribe to watch something and unsubscribe after a month or two because that's when I'm well and done. My husband had some free three months of Disney+ and I don't think either of us watched a single thing on there in that three months.
We noticed this also for the online software services that we use. Many of them increased in price, which I can understand with rising costs. However, a large number of them also have/introduced a 'hostile' structure that force you into paying through the nose. Case in point was the timesheet software that we used:
* They increased the cost of all price tiers.
* They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more.
* And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing.
This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore.
You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...
To play devil's advocate a bit: running software isn't free. If you're paying for an online service, the hosting cost to the company does scale per-seat. It's easy to say that the company only paid the cost of development once (and even then, more users = more development demand), but you're not a user of a single unit of developed software.
For streaming services, I think the development-hosting needle swings way towards hosting. Streaming video is the vast majority of their costs and efforts, so scaling prices per-user is the only sensible option. The "software" of those services is bad and interchangeable, and not what anyone wants or is paying for in the first place.
I like occasionally watching movies. I will rarely watch a movie twice. Streaming would be the best option for me, but I will not subscribe to more than one service. Get your shit together. Do cross licensing. Split production from distribution. Until then I will not be paying for any streaming service.
So in real terms it's up 26%. Which of course is to be expected, people have a set amount they are willing to spend on entertainment, in the past it was cable -- in 2015 the average US cable TV subscription was about $100, that's about $140 today in real terms, or $1700 a year.
Seems that streamers have a long way to go before they extract all that money.
That’s the average household cable tv subscription, no?
I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions.
I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.
The average household cable tv subscription didn't get you access to all the music, enormous amount of youtube content, shipping benefits, and ad-break free watching. And it wasn't on demand viewing. And it required using a special device in a specific room in a specific house.
In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).
I don't know about in the US, but I live in a fairly small city in Canada and we have DVD rentals. I go to the video store almost every week, and it was on the papers that a second one (which will also rent out VHS!) is opening.
The Library does DVD rentals too, I check it out every couple of months.
It's even better in Toronto, Bay Street Video is an institution.
Eh, I miss video rental stores in the US, but I don't agree that they would solve this problem. I worked for a large chain of them as a teen, and know first-hand that people were spending just as much on rentals as they do with subscription services, especially when you add in game rentals and late fees.
More importantly, it does not solve the problem of ownership. We don't own a rented disc just as much as we don't own a DRM-controlled digital purchase that can only be accessed via the subscription portal it was purchased on.
Important context here is that many of these streaming services operated at a loss for years, and some still are. HBO Max didn’t turn a profit until 2023 and Disney only become profitable in 2024 after bundling with Hulu. AFAIK Paramount+ and Peacock are still in the red.
Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.
1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me.
2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't).
With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'll gladly pay for them and download them(last purchase from a few weeks ago). If not - pirating it is.
Still a great ecosystem and value for dollar overall! That's one reason why prices have gone up.
No long-term contracts, no additional hardware needed, no hidden fees. Still the option to not see ads for most of the services. You can freely jump from service to services.
Plenty of promos out there still, too: for example, I get $10 back per month on an ad-free Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle through my credit card. That plan costs me about $31/month: $31 doesn't buy me a meal out with my family, it doesn't buy me a single football ticket, it might get me into one movie with the family if I do some cheap matinee (not counting gas to drive up and snacks).
If you go to a restaurant for a meal, you own nothing after that, but you can be happy. If you go to an entertainment park, you own nothing after that for your ticket, but you can be happy.
Making customer happy is an extraordinary valuable service one can provide, and that doesn't have to require connection with materially owning anything.
Exactly, what we have now is vastly better than whatever existed before (in terms of convenience and price). Watch when I want, what I want, how I want, and never pay for anything I don't want and never see ads and never have to go somewhere to get it.
I especially like not paying for sports to watch the few shows/movies I like.
Some people who like to (legally) own media might be disappointed, though.
The TV license is insane to me, as a non-brit moving to the uk.
I am happy to pay a reasonable price for something I use.
But the threats I get about a GBP 1,000 is very un-british.
I don't know who runs the TV licensing scheme but they need to be sacked.
Thankfully if you can look past this gamesmanship then it is possible to call them and decline to participate in this nonsense.
The "licensing" has a point because it does make the BBC more impartial since the current government cannot adjust their funding down or up depending on their programming.
However, the same aim could be achieved by just setting a formula in law. 1 pound per british citizen, or 0.0001% of the average income per citizen last year. Numbers pulled out of ass as i have no idea what an UK tv license costs. As long as they make the formula extremely hard to change, it will work.
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched information in the world, but with such an obviously vibecoded site I'm not going to attempt to read it.
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched text in the world, but with such obviously machine made paper I'm not going to attempt to read it.
Even if the information is accurate, I'm calling it low effort slop... Smart LLMs have basically automated producing a plausible looking "content farm".
What is the alternative to subscribing to streaming services? Can you purchase your movies online and be guaranteed to have access to the movies in the future?
Libraries! They often have digital access to various services—e.g. Kanopy—but also often have lots of physical media sources! It involves a little more planning and a little less algorithm, and there are shows and movies that won't ever be available—e.g. things from Netflix, Apple—but there's enough out there already.
If you want guaranteed future access, then this is probably the only online option that actually fulfills this guarantee... other than that, physical media.
I regularly snag DVDs for $1 USD or less at garage/yard/boot sales. I see tons of cheap used physical media in record shops when I travel, too. eBay and Facebook Marketplace are also great sources for used DVD.
I promote this because not only does it restore some mastery* over your media, it keeps these discs out of landfills and oceans, where they will linger in a shredded state.
*we are, of course, still subject to any anti-piracy measures and non-removeable advertisements on the disc, which admittedly seems quaint by today's DRM standards, but I ccannot rightly say "complete" mastery over your media, here.
I watch films on streaming rather than old dvds with unskippable nonsense like "don't pirate this dvd" (well obviously I didn't, that's why I have the dvd), or the pain of the menu systems to just press play.
Physical media isn't guaranteed to retain future access. There are protocols for players to update various bits of data from the newest disk you have ever inserted into them. The Nintendo Wii certainly does this, I'm not sure if BluRay does but I don't see why they wouldn't.
Subscribe, screengrab what you like, unsubscribe. Repeat. Really easy to do in a virtual machine, so it doesn't conflict with anything else happening on the computer.
You can still buy physical media online, though an increasing portion of movies and shows are produced by the streaming companies, and you don’t really have an alternative there.
No. The whole issue is that the seller needs to maintain an online service to allow you access to the movies. This online service costs money so over time is likely not worth the cost. This plus the online service provider undergoing changes (bankruptcy, acquisition, mergers, etc) or they themselves losing rights to the movies. Seems to me that rental or purchases are still unbeatable. The alternative is streaming but the downside is higher costs over time and worse quality movies.
In the old torrent days I was only watching classical masterpieces and top level world directors. In the streaming era I only watch mediocre straight-to-streaming movies, few popular TV series and too much reality TV that I'm not proud to watch.
Realistically you don't absolutely need a VPS to run your own tunnel through for bittorrent. You can do something like install a virtualbox machine that mounts your local samba file share across the LAN (to store downloaded stuff), and otherwise has a default route outbound to the world through a $5/mo VPN that exits to the Internet in like, Chișinău Moldova. Or similar.
The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.
Hi honestlyranked you might want to reach out to the mods, your comments are dead. I think you are meant to put info in the submitted post text field, not in the comments, I could be wrong!
This is what I am always curious about with these tech valuations. They’re valued at multiple times earnings, often 30+. That implies 30 years to earn back an investment iff earnings are payed out. Yet all are immediately enshittifying or price gauging when they hit monopoly / have market share. Is the bet then that thats just gonna be the status quo? I guess historically it was a good bet.
Context matters, because absent it folks will look at these increases and shrug it off as inflation (or let companies shrug it off with that excuse).
To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points.
From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.
I'm mostly down to one. It's called Daddyflix (Jellyfin, actually) and runs on a Mac Mini in my home office. Costs close to zero, is accessible everywhere and there's no ads or other bullshit.
Yeah same. I have an agent running on it, so whenever one of my kids asks to watch something that their friends have told them about it, provided it's not retarded, I tell the agent to go find it and it shows up on the kids TV. No monthly bullshit (apart from the AI supscription I pay for anyway). Automated piracy. I love it.
Which metric of inflation are you adjusting it to? And which assumptions are built into the goods and services measured, as well as their respective weights, of that index?
I got annoyed that "the price" of a subscription is really two prices — the one advertised and the one you end up paying — and that nobody keeps the receipts. So I built a tracker that checks 27 providers' public pricing pages daily, and separately curated dated, sourced price histories for streaming services going back to 2010.
The streaming number surprised me. Nine services, flagship tiers:
March 2021: $95.91/month. Today: $154.41/month. That's +61%, or $702 more per year for the same nine subscriptions.
Per service since 2021-03: Apple TV+ +200%, Disney+ +138%, Peacock +100%, Hulu +58%, Netflix +43%, Paramount+ +40%, YouTube Premium +33%, Spotify +30%, HBO Max +23%. 75 documented increases across 11 services, every one linked to the announcement or report that covered it. The most recent was Apple TV+, $12.99 to $14.99 on 28 August.
Two services are tracked but deliberately left out of that basket: YouTube TV (a live-TV bundle, $35 to $82.99 since 2017 — the steepest riser I have, but it is a cable replacement, not an on-demand subscription) and Prime Video (an add-on to a Prime membership, not standalone). Putting either in would have made the headline bigger and the comparison worse.
One methodology note, because I got this wrong first: my initial version summed each service's launch price, which gave a bigger, better headline. But those launches span 2010 to 2021, so that basket never existed — nobody could have bought it. Recomputing from March 2021, the first month all nine existed, gives the smaller +61% figure. I'd rather publish the smaller true one.
Same thing happened with the ad tiers. I expected to find ad-free plans being hiked faster to push people toward advertising. Disney+ fits — ad-free +73% vs ad-supported +50% over the same window. Netflix doesn't: it raised both by exactly 29%. What did happen at both is the cash gap widened — Netflix $8.50 to $11.00/month, Disney+ $3 to $7/month.
The daily side covers hosting, VPN, antivirus and SaaS: 42 of 75 tracked plans renew above their advertised price, averaging +196%. The extreme is IONOS at +1,300% ($1/mo advertised, $14/mo at renewal). 9 providers never raise renewal prices at all — two of them, Mullvad and Windscribe, run no affiliate programme, so nobody has a commercial reason to mention them.
Limits, stated up front: I measure published pricing only — I don't test the products and make no claim about quality. Prices are read from one fixed location (Pakistan), which is stated on the site; for most of these the price is global, but where a provider geo-prices, my figure describes that vantage point. Streaming histories are curated from primary sources rather than scraped, which is how they go back further than my own tracking.
Happy to talk about the scraping side — Cloudflare, JS-rendered prices, A/B-tested prices, and providers who publish no renewal figure at all.
98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar.
Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. "
I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.
The level of phoning in the complete lack of any work beyond the absolute bare minimum is the most frustrating aspect to me.
https://www.pangram.com/
Or since a lot of vibe coded static sites are just plain html, cs, js, a first try attempt via wget to mirror the first 500KB of the site and then analyze it.
It is way cheaper long term.
How few songs do you listen to, and movies/shows do you watch, for this to possibly be true?
As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.
Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.
Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex
Until Sam Altman disrupted the entire computer economy, HDDs were cheap and when you replace your desktop, the old one becomes a server.
With streaming TV/video ones, honestly, the selection fucking suck for the most part and the free ones seem to have more movies I actually enjoy. If I weren’t getting them for significantly reduced cost through other deals, I would probably cut the ones I have.
I’m not disagreeing that it could be more expensive to buy movies and CDs and certainly less convenient, but to say it’s worth paying these ever-increasing rates is a bit nuts for me when compared to the alternative.
Right, so then how you really access most of your your music is through advertising or ad-blocking, not CDs.
Personally, I also listen to a lot of ad-free college radio and watch a lot of online videos. Depending on what type of entertainment you enjoy, it's really not hard to pay next to nothing for it without compromising.
Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13
There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.
So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.
This is not that unusual. I also have never had any of these, or any other, streaming services. It's been wonderful.
If the answer is "I pirate stuff", that's fine. But just be honest about it.
Music I don't get, you can't even buy a single CD for the price of a streaming music subscription, unless you buy used, in which case you can get as many as 10 CDs per month.
Video streaming and it's licensing model is horribly horribly broken, there's no reason why I should have three to five subscriptions just so HBO and Netflix can produce yet another drawn out true crime show about someone how got lost half way around the world in 1983.
LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, mp3 players, etc.
You didn't have the whole world at your hands. You had to pick what to listen to, what to buy, what to carry.
Yes, it's nice having the world available, but also, it's nice being able to sometimes think, ponder, make a decision, and explore that decision.
Based on all the responses, people need to learn to make a decision and live with it for a bit.
- Picked a song and it's not the perfect one? meh, okay. - Also learn to be in the quiet. Oh, the song is not meh, but bad? Turn it off. It's okay. - learn to read a book
What you are doing is practically the same equivalent as downloading torrents, how do you have "more guarantees" than just downloading?
PS: I'm saying this because what you are doing is already illegal so there is virtually no difference.
Otherwise this is akin to comparing speed of 2 objects in a relativistic setting without stating the frame of reference.
Side note: I don't know why, but the existence of a "cite this" section on this page made me sad.
The relevant comparison would be your individual wages.
Inflation isn't some force of nature that needs to be accounted for like the curvature of the earth.
That's like saying your snow report for skiing should be adjusted for weather.
I am probably an outlier but I don't honestly know how much someone can watch on theses services to be always subscribed, I subscribe to watch something and unsubscribe after a month or two because that's when I'm well and done. My husband had some free three months of Disney+ and I don't think either of us watched a single thing on there in that three months.
* They increased the cost of all price tiers.
* They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more.
* And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing.
This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore.
You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...
For streaming services, I think the development-hosting needle swings way towards hosting. Streaming video is the vast majority of their costs and efforts, so scaling prices per-user is the only sensible option. The "software" of those services is bad and interchangeable, and not what anyone wants or is paying for in the first place.
Seems that streamers have a long way to go before they extract all that money.
I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions.
I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.
Inflation is multiplicative, so: 1.277 * 1.26 = 1.61 giving us the 61% subscriptions went up.
I love music and used to have Spotify, but I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog.
Now I buy online or rip my CDs, it’s much better and works offline.
https://cololocation.com/
In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).
The Library does DVD rentals too, I check it out every couple of months.
It's even better in Toronto, Bay Street Video is an institution.
More importantly, it does not solve the problem of ownership. We don't own a rented disc just as much as we don't own a DRM-controlled digital purchase that can only be accessed via the subscription portal it was purchased on.
Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.
1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me.
2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't).
With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'll gladly pay for them and download them(last purchase from a few weeks ago). If not - pirating it is.
Is that number really correct?
It seems remarkably coincidental how close $1,852.92 is to
$1,150.92 * 1.10^5 ($1,853.56)
It's pretty much a match accounting for kibblesworth effects.
No long-term contracts, no additional hardware needed, no hidden fees. Still the option to not see ads for most of the services. You can freely jump from service to services.
Plenty of promos out there still, too: for example, I get $10 back per month on an ad-free Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle through my credit card. That plan costs me about $31/month: $31 doesn't buy me a meal out with my family, it doesn't buy me a single football ticket, it might get me into one movie with the family if I do some cheap matinee (not counting gas to drive up and snacks).
Are you a netflix exec by any chance?
If you go to a restaurant for a meal, you own nothing after that, but you can be happy. If you go to an entertainment park, you own nothing after that for your ticket, but you can be happy.
Making customer happy is an extraordinary valuable service one can provide, and that doesn't have to require connection with materially owning anything.
I especially like not paying for sports to watch the few shows/movies I like.
Some people who like to (legally) own media might be disappointed, though.
"nine streaming subscriptions".
No one sane will do nine streaming subscriptions. The market is insane in itself for assuming that.
That's four. I don't want any of them.
Three I have to take due to kids' nagging, the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.
However, the same aim could be achieved by just setting a formula in law. 1 pound per british citizen, or 0.0001% of the average income per citizen last year. Numbers pulled out of ass as i have no idea what an UK tv license costs. As long as they make the formula extremely hard to change, it will work.
Bring some sanity back to the world.
Did you gatekeep people who built sites with FrontPage as well?
I promote this because not only does it restore some mastery* over your media, it keeps these discs out of landfills and oceans, where they will linger in a shredded state.
*we are, of course, still subject to any anti-piracy measures and non-removeable advertisements on the disc, which admittedly seems quaint by today's DRM standards, but I ccannot rightly say "complete" mastery over your media, here.
Fun fact: pirates are more likely than the average person to purchase media.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170916165525/https://www.ofcom...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/anoth...
They seem to have gotten away with it so far, so there's no legal protection for "buying" digital at the moment.
2/ consume free streaming (tt, ig, YouTube, etc)
Just don’t watch movies at home.
The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.
And whatever leftover storage you have.
And PIA or Proton for a port forwardable VPN.
And https://github.com/halcyon-video/halcyon-video for that real Blockbuster experience.
I think it's the look of the page: dark background and bright colours with an halo.
To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points.
From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.
Pay some portion of that over the years and end up owning ... absolutely nothing.
The streaming number surprised me. Nine services, flagship tiers:
March 2021: $95.91/month. Today: $154.41/month. That's +61%, or $702 more per year for the same nine subscriptions.
Per service since 2021-03: Apple TV+ +200%, Disney+ +138%, Peacock +100%, Hulu +58%, Netflix +43%, Paramount+ +40%, YouTube Premium +33%, Spotify +30%, HBO Max +23%. 75 documented increases across 11 services, every one linked to the announcement or report that covered it. The most recent was Apple TV+, $12.99 to $14.99 on 28 August.
Two services are tracked but deliberately left out of that basket: YouTube TV (a live-TV bundle, $35 to $82.99 since 2017 — the steepest riser I have, but it is a cable replacement, not an on-demand subscription) and Prime Video (an add-on to a Prime membership, not standalone). Putting either in would have made the headline bigger and the comparison worse.
One methodology note, because I got this wrong first: my initial version summed each service's launch price, which gave a bigger, better headline. But those launches span 2010 to 2021, so that basket never existed — nobody could have bought it. Recomputing from March 2021, the first month all nine existed, gives the smaller +61% figure. I'd rather publish the smaller true one.
Same thing happened with the ad tiers. I expected to find ad-free plans being hiked faster to push people toward advertising. Disney+ fits — ad-free +73% vs ad-supported +50% over the same window. Netflix doesn't: it raised both by exactly 29%. What did happen at both is the cash gap widened — Netflix $8.50 to $11.00/month, Disney+ $3 to $7/month.
The daily side covers hosting, VPN, antivirus and SaaS: 42 of 75 tracked plans renew above their advertised price, averaging +196%. The extreme is IONOS at +1,300% ($1/mo advertised, $14/mo at renewal). 9 providers never raise renewal prices at all — two of them, Mullvad and Windscribe, run no affiliate programme, so nobody has a commercial reason to mention them.
Data is CC BY 4.0: https://honestlyranked.com/data/renewal-prices.csv
Method: https://honestlyranked.com/methodology/
Limits, stated up front: I measure published pricing only — I don't test the products and make no claim about quality. Prices are read from one fixed location (Pakistan), which is stated on the site; for most of these the price is global, but where a provider geo-prices, my figure describes that vantage point. Streaming histories are curated from primary sources rather than scraped, which is how they go back further than my own tracking.
Happy to talk about the scraping side — Cloudflare, JS-rendered prices, A/B-tested prices, and providers who publish no renewal figure at all.