Streaming Inflation Gap

Streaming prices aren’t just rising - they’re surging past inflation.

Early in the streaming days, Netflix set the benchmark: premium content at a low monthly price. That anchored both consumers and the industry.

With historically low interest rates, other streamers piled in, attempting to copy the Netflix playbook with low prices and subscriber growth at any cost.

But when rates rose and Wall Street demanded profits, the math broke down.
So prices started climbing. And they haven’t just tracked inflation, they’ve surged far beyond it.

👉 The chart below shows the story. It tracks the year-over-year % change in the combined monthly cost of the big SVODs (Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Peacock, Paramount+, Apple TV+) if you subscribed to all of them (standard, ad-free), compared against U.S. CPI.

Since Jan 2023, the gap has been striking:
- SVOD prices have grown ~12.6% per year
- CPI inflation averaged just ~3.3% per year

That’s nearly 4x faster than consumer inflation.

Most platforms are now profitable. But investors still want more.

How much higher can prices go before consumers push back?