Streaming Video Sees Wave Of Price Hikes In Apparent Bid To Mimic Cable & Embolden Piracy
from the history-repeats-itself dept
One of the major benefits of cutting the traditional TV cord and switching to streaming video services was supposed to be the lower cost of service. But because broadcasters dictate the licensing cost of content for both services, it was inevitable that the sector would increasingly mimic its traditional cable counterparts. As a result, numerous streaming video services used the July 4th holiday to obfuscate an industry wide price hike, driving up the monthly subscription costs of services like AT&T's DirecTV Now, Sony's Playstation Vue, and Dish Network's Sling TV.
AT&T's price hike, a $5 bump for all of the company's DirecTV Now streaming TV tiers, is likely getting the most attention because it's the precise type of hike AT&T repeatedly stated wouldn't be happening if regulators signed off on the company's $86 billion merger with Time Warner. AT&T lawyers repeatedly claimed during the recent court battle with the DOJ that the deal would lower prices, not raise them:
"The evidence overwhelmingly showed that this merger is likely to enhance competition substantially, because it will enable the merged company to reduce prices, offer innovative video products, and compete more effectively against the increasingly powerful, vertically integrated 'FAANG' [Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google] companies," AT&T told US District Judge Richard Leon in the brief...Price benefits should flow to consumers quickly, AT&T's filing said. "[C]ertain merger efficiencies will begin exerting downward pressure on consumer prices almost immediately [after the merger]" AT&T wrote.
As with most megamerger promises of synergies and consumer benefits, that obviously didn't happen. AT&T took on such a massive debt hit from the deal, it's now looking to raise rates wherever and however possible, whether that means a price hike for TV streaming, or obnoxious and misleading fees that can help quickly and covertly pad AT&T's bottom line.
As we've long seen with traditional cable, streaming ops are imposing the rates in quiet unison, engaging in what I've affectionately long referred to as "wink wink, nudge nudge" competition. In addition to price hikes at AT&T, Dish and Sony, Netflix says it's also experimenting with a higher-priced tier specifically targeting customers with 4K and HDR capable sets. It's a tricky balancing act; these services want to pass on higher programming rates demanded by broadcasters, but don't want to undermine the entire reason that customers cut the cord and head to cheaper streaming alternatives in the first place.
On a positive note, many correctly point out that streaming is still generally seen as a real value when compared to traditional cable, something that should remain true for the forseeable future:
"Even after the current wave of price hikes, live TV streaming services are generally much cheaper than the average traditional TV bill. For packages that include major broadcast networks, regional and national sports coverage, and major news networks, the price for live TV streaming still floats around $40 to $50 per month. That's less than half the average $106 that U.S. homes spent on traditional TV service last year, according to Leichtman Research Group."
But that value could quickly be eroded if streaming operators continue to mimic their legacy counterparts, something that's less of a strain for streaming operators that are vertically integrated broadcasters themselves (Comcast, AT&T); yet another advantage compounded by the repeal of net neutrality. Streaming operators have numerous other pitfalls awaiting them as the streaming video wars truly get underway, including the rise of exclusive content deals that could force customers back to piracy if they're forced to hunt and peck between too many pricey exclusivity silos.
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Filed Under: cord cutting, price hikes, streaming video
Companies: at&t
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Netflix is underpriced
Aside from Hulu and Netflix, the only other thing we usually watch right now is MLB.tv but we also have to have a regular cable subscription due to MLB's obnoxious black out policy. Stop blacking out games and I'll drop cable.
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Re: Netflix is underpriced
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Re: Netflix is underpriced
I wouldn't call for a price rise, but there's more than enough value to handle one if required.
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Bit of a disingenuous comparison
And it's also not clear which of things like "service fee", "programming fee" and other variations of "bullshit fee", "reality over advertising fee", "competitive disadvantage fee" are to be considered part of streaming service costs.
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Re: Bit of a disingenuous comparison
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They were creatively interpreting alternative facts.
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See the baseball player who clearly flat out lied to Congress under oath about not doing steroids who was found not guilty.
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Look at what they said: "The evidence overwhelmingly showed"; "it will enable the merged company to reduce prices"; "Price benefits should flow to consumers".
Well, the evidence is part of the court record, and I expect does show that—probably because the lawyers dumped an overwhelming amount of "evidence" onto the court. The company probably is able to reduce prices, if they choose to. And sure, price benefits should flow to consumers—they won't, but they should.
What else would we expect from corporate lawyers? If we want to get out ahead, we need to get an explicit legally binding promise, not just a bunch of "predictions". And they're still not going to do what they promised unless there are some serious penalties involved.
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Re: "lying under oath"
I would wager not. Unless they are on trial, AND TAKE THE STAND, what a lawyer says in court is NOT under oath, barring swearing that the information in their initial documents is true to the best of their knowledge(which basically amounts to, "this is what my client told me, and I haven't seen anything that proves to the contrary") .
You may think that their in court statements should be under oath, but as the stands (and how it has stood since the ink on the Constitution was wet), they are not under oath.
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but seriously tho....
Mike is such a pirate shill.
pretty sure he owns Pirate Bay and Torrentsite.com
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Double the fun...
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Re: Double the fun...
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Re: Re: Double the fun...
Part of the revenue will be from ads swamping the user, part of the revenue will be from malware payloads, part will be from selling user data to high bidders, like burglars wanting to know when a house isn't occupied.
Zero price means hidden cost. You don't want that to increase exponentially.
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Anyone?
Anyone here go out and spend a BIG amount of money, and WISH they had a better job or raise their OWN wages??
Any company thats doing mergers and spending over 1/2 of there Corp Value is going to Drop a few pennies..and It MIGHT hurt your stock prices.. And how many would DROP the corp stocks?? The Value would go down abit..and LOTS of people would LOVE to buy up those stocks..
BUT its strange that STOCKS are not showing the true value of corps anymore..
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FAAG
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Titanic history
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ATT&T Sucks
AT&T's price hike, a $5 bump for all of the company's DirecTV Now streaming TV tiers, is likely getting the most attention because it's the precise type of hike AT&T repeatedly stated wouldn't be happening if regulators signed off on the company's $86 billion merger with Time Warner.
AT&T is a disgrace.
First by lying to the court about post-merger pricing stability and potential efficiencies realized resulting in lower pricing schemes.
Second by having the audacity to raise subscription rates for a clearly defective service (ie DirectTVNow) that suffers from a number of issues (eg clunky user interface/guide that can take up to a minute to load while completely obscuring the display with white splash screen, channels in subscribers programing package that will not stream, movies on demand section that streams intermittently and stops playing with 3 minutes left in every movie, etc) that detract from the overall entertainment value for the subscriber.
Disclosure: We were DirectTVNow subscribers for a little over a year and have just cancelled our subscription.
Our streaming device was/is the ROKU Premiere +
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