Bogus Analysis Claim of the Week: The Price For a 'Basket' of Top U.S. Streaming Services Has Surpassed Cable TV?

Daniel Frankel
·2 min read
SVOD services
SVOD services

Disney just raised the monthly price of Disney Plus premium in the U.S to $13.99 a month, starting in October -- that's more than double what we paid for the service just three years ago.

The price of Hulu sans ads just went up from $14.99 to $17.99. NBCU now wants $11.99 a month for ad-free Peacock, and Paramount wants the same for the recently introduced combined Paramount Plus/Showtime tier. For its part, Netflix raised the price of its most popular "standard" tier to $15.49 back in January. And the ad-free version of Warner Bros. Discovery's Max recently went up by a dollar to $15.99 a month.

Grouping all six of these subscription streaming services together in a "basket," as the paywalled Financial Times describes it, the monthly price has shot up to $87.44. That's not only a 29% increase over where these six platforms stood price-wise as recently as October of last year, it's more than the current "average" price of a "comparable" cable TV package, the FT said, pegging that number at $83 a month.

Forget that we don't have any idea what the FT is talking about in regard to any symmetry for packages of live linear networks vs. SVOD services. We do know that set-top fees, surcharges on things like broadcast networks and regional sports networks, along with various other monthly dings, typically drive the monthly cost of linear pay TV well over $100.

But beyond that: If you're taking Disney Plus and Hulu, there's no reason why you wouldn't take the $20-a-month bundle for the two services vs. paying $30 a month, so chop $10 off FT's $87.44 estimate right there.

The pub also basing its SVOD pricing on the most premium of ad-free iterations. For example, Peacock Premium, which has a limited number of commercials, is half the price of Peacock Premium Plus.

And there are lots of aggressive "on us" promotions going on with the various large wireless carriers these days, which FT seems to ignore. Verizon, for example, is giving away a year free of Netflix's super-primo $19.99-a-month plan to its unlimited customers.

Bottom line: Carrying the major subscription streaming services, while not as cheap as it used to be, isn't yet a $90-a-month proposition.