Streaming Now Costs $73 a Month (Cable Was $71)

The pitch was simple and everyone believed it, including the people making it. Cancel cable, pay eight dollars, watch what you want, skip the 200 channels you never touched. For about six years that trade was real. Then the studios pulled their libraries back, launched their own platforms, and streaming subscription costs stopped being a discount and started being a bill.

Four services is now the normal household load. Nobody chose four. You chose one, then a show moved, then a second show moved, then somebody signed up for a free trial in March 2023 that has renewed nineteen times.

What do streaming subscription costs add up to now?

J.D. Power's quarterly bill tracker recorded an average U.S. streaming bill of $73.47 a month in January 2025, down about a dollar from a year earlier. Deloitte's 2025 Digital Media Trends survey, which asks households directly, landed at roughly $69 a month across about four services.

Call it $70 either way. That is $840 a year for television, on top of home internet, which is required to receive it.

The flatness of that number is the interesting part. Prices per service went up. The total did not, because households responded by canceling, rotating, and downgrading to ad tiers. The bill held steady only because people worked to hold it steady.

How does that compare to what cable cost?

Leichtman Research Group has surveyed pay-TV pricing for two decades. Its figures track the whole arc.

Streaming is cheaper than cable today. It is also right about where cable sat in 2010, and $71 in 2010 buys north of $100 now once you adjust for inflation using BLS consumer price data. So the honest summary is that streaming cost consumers a real saving, that saving has been eroding for a decade, and the gap is closing from the streaming side.

Why did the price keep climbing?

Because the economics never supported $7.99 and everyone knew it.

Netflix spent the 2010s buying subscribers with a price below what the content cost, funded by debt and by licensing deals the studios later regretted. When Disney, Warner, Paramount, and NBCUniversal pulled their catalogs to launch competing services, two things happened at once. Netflix had to spend billions producing originals to replace what it lost, and the viewer had to subscribe to five companies to watch what one cable package used to carry.

Fragmentation is the whole story. Every studio that launched a platform converted a wholesale licensing deal into a retail relationship with you. The content did not multiply. The number of bills did.

Then the price hikes began arriving on a schedule. Netflix, Disney, Max, Hulu, Peacock, and Paramount have all raised rates repeatedly since 2022, usually by a dollar or three, usually in the same season. Each increase is small enough to absorb and too small to cancel over, which is the point. Six services raising prices two dollars each is a twelve-dollar-a-month increase nobody decided to accept.

Why are you watching ads again?

Because an ad tier is the only way to raise revenue per viewer without raising the advertised price, and Deloitte's numbers show how fast that worked.

Sixty-eight percent of U.S. respondents had at least one ad-supported subscription in 2025, up from 46% the year before. Double-digit growth across every generation. Deloitte also found that about 73% of subscribers were frustrated by continuing price increases, and that roughly 61% would cancel their favorite service over a $5 monthly hike.

Read those together and the mechanism is clear. Households are at the edge of what they will pay, services know it, and the ad tier is how you extract more from a customer who has stopped accepting higher prices. Commercials were the thing cord-cutting was supposed to escape. Two-thirds of subscribers have now accepted them back as the price of staying under budget.

Sources: Leichtman Research Group; J.D. Power; Deloitte Digital Media Trends, 2025.

One row in that table still favors streaming, and it is not nothing. You can cancel. Cable made you call a retention department and argue for forty minutes. That freedom is real, and it is the only reason the average bill has stopped climbing.

Does canceling one service help?

For a month or two. Then the show you follow moves, or the service you kept raises its price, or a free trial you took for one documentary renews.

This is why the streaming line is best understood not on its own but as one entry in the stack of recurring charges running in the background, where surveys find households underestimating their true monthly total by a wide margin. The rotation strategy works, and it requires you to manage a budget line the industry designed to manage itself.

It is the same arrangement as the monthly phone bill and what Americans pay for home internet: a mandatory-feeling recurring charge, priced by a handful of large firms, that arrives whether you use it or not.

Entertainment stopped being cheap

Television is not a human right and nobody is owed HBO. That is worth saying, because the affordability argument does not need to pretend otherwise.

What the numbers do show is a pattern that repeats across every category of American household spending. A market gets unbundled, prices fall, consumers celebrate, and then the market reconsolidates around a handful of firms that rebuild the old price with a new interface. Cable cost $71 in 2010. Streaming costs $73 now, with ads, across four separate charges, plus $70 to $80 for the internet connection required to receive it.

Meanwhile the wage floor has sat at $7.25 an hour since 2009 while every one of those numbers moved. An hour of minimum-wage labor bought more television in 2011 than it does today, which is the same reversal showing up in rent, groceries, insurance, and everything else that outran the paycheck. The full set of those numbers is collected on our stats page.