Did you know that cable TV was first introduced in the 1940s? It’s true, and early cable was nothing more than a way to improve television reception in remote areas. Pay TV has a lot more functions than that today, and the increase in functionality of cable and satellite over the decades has been accompanied by a huge increase in price.
Virtual multi-channel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) — or live TV streaming services — are no different than traditional pay-TV sources in terms of historical price increases. VMVPDs offer great convenience, providing cord-cutters all of the channels that they love without requiring cable hookups, set-top boxes, or long-term contracts. But such services can be expensive, and in some cases live TV streamers have outpaced the cable and satellite services they originally aimed to replace in terms of price.
Take fuboTV, for example. The service enacted a $5 price increase in the first week of January 2023, raising its subscription cost to $74.99 per month for its lowest-cost plan. That means that since its launch in 2015, when it was primarily a soccer streaming service, Fubo has raised its price from $7 per month to $75.
That’s an increase of nearly 1,000% in eight years. To be sure, fuboTV has grown far past its original mission of providing soccer streamers with a low-cost option to watch games. Though still sports-focused, the service now offers 90+ channels, and even offers select events in ultra-high-definition 4K at no extra charge.
But fuboTV is not the only service to see big cost increases in the recent past. DIRECTV STREAM is raising prices of its subscription plans by $5-$10 per month this month, with its lowest price plan starting at $74.99. That’s an 87.5% increase over what users were paying five years ago when the service was called DIRECTV NOW. At that time, plans with 60+ channels started at $40 per month.
Related: Which Streaming Services Are Due For a Price Hike in 2023?
These numbers indicate that as of now, live TV subscription costs are rising at a faster rate than college tuition. The five-year average inflation rate among four-year public institutions is 1.33%, according to the Education Data Initiative. Going back even further, between 2010 and 2020, the cost of tuition at public four-year colleges increased 31.4%, which is still a far cry from the increases live TV streamers have seen.
To be sure, college tuition is still a much greater expense than live TV streaming. But the numbers show clearly that live TV streaming customers have seen their bills increasing at a very high rate, highlighting just how similar to cable and satellite vMVPDs have become. Obviously what live streamers offer their customers has changed dramatically over the past five years, with the increase in channels, options, and video quality, but even with those improvements, you do have to question whether or not the value is still there at the ever-increasing prices.
Cord-cutters may have defected to live TV streaming to save a little money, but that goal is proving more difficult with each passing year.