You're Paying More to Watch Less: The Streaming Suicide Pact Nobody Asked to Sign

Remember when Netflix was the scrappy little DVD-by-mail company that was going to liberate us from the tyranny of Comcast? You'd pay one flat fee, watch whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, and the bloated cable bundle would die screaming in a ditch somewhere outside of Des Moines. It was a beautiful dream. A genuinely good idea executed so well that it changed human behavior on a civilizational scale.

That was then. This is now. And now is a hellscape.

Welcome to the era of streaming enshittification—a term borrowed from tech writer Cory Doctorow that describes exactly what happens when a platform first captures users, then captures the industry, and finally turns around to extract maximum value from both while delivering minimum product. The streaming wars were supposed to produce winners. Instead, they produced something far more familiar: cable TV with a better UI and worse customer service.

From Revolution to Racket in Under a Decade

Let's do a quick accounting of how we got here. In 2015, you could get Netflix for $8 a month. No ads. No password police. A genuinely decent library that included both prestige television and the kind of weird foreign cinema that made you feel cultured at 1 AM. People canceled cable in droves. The cord-cutting movement wasn't just economic—it was ideological. Consumers were voting with their wallets against a system that had spent decades holding them hostage.

Then the studios panicked. Disney yanked its content to launch Disney+. WarnerMedia spun up HBO Max. NBCUniversal gave us Peacock, which sounds like a joke but is, unfortunately, real. Paramount+ arrived. Apple TV+ materialized. Suddenly the entire premise—one affordable service with everything on it—was dead. You needed five subscriptions to approximate what cable had offered, and you were paying roughly the same amount.

And then the price hikes started. Netflix's standard plan has nearly tripled since 2015. Disney+ launched at $6.99 and has blown past $13.99 for the no-ads version. Hulu, which Disney also owns, quietly became one of the most expensive options on the market. The platforms had completed the transition from disruptors to incumbents, and incumbents, as history reliably demonstrates, do exactly one thing: squeeze.

The Password Crackdown Was Always Coming

Netflix's 2023 crackdown on password sharing was the moment the mask fully came off. The company had spent years quietly tolerating—and even occasionally encouraging—account sharing as a growth mechanism. It helped normalize the platform. It got Netflix into households that might eventually subscribe on their own. It was, functionally, free marketing.

Then Wall Street started asking hard questions about subscriber growth, and suddenly your sister in Tucson using your login became a crisis requiring immediate intervention. Netflix rolled out its crackdown with the energy of a landlord who just discovered their tenant had been subletting, and with roughly the same amount of goodwill generated. The response was predictable: millions of people canceled. Piracy traffic spiked noticeably in the months that followed. The Pirate Bay posted a cheerful little traffic report. It was embarrassing.

But here's the corporate logic, and it's worth understanding even if it makes you want to throw your router out the window: Wall Street doesn't care about happy customers. It cares about revenue per user and growth metrics. Password sharers weren't paying customers—they were a liability dressed up as a vanity metric. Forcing them to pay or leave improved the numbers that matter to investors, even if it alienated the actual humans using the product.

The Algorithm That Hides the Good Stuff

There's a particular cruelty to modern streaming interfaces that doesn't get discussed enough. These platforms contain genuinely excellent content—years of prestige television, acclaimed films, brilliant international productions—and then they bury all of it under an algorithmic sludge of mediocre originals that exist primarily to justify the platform's existence as a "content creator" rather than a distributor.

Netflix in particular has become notorious for producing enormous quantities of mid-tier content—reality shows, true crime docuseries, action movies with recognizable faces and no discernible personality—and then using its algorithm to push that content aggressively while letting actual gems rot in the catalog. The algorithm isn't designed to help you find something great. It's designed to keep you watching something, which is a fundamentally different goal with fundamentally worse outcomes.

The result is a kind of content obesity: you're technically full, but you're malnourished. You've watched six hours of television and you couldn't tell a stranger what happened in any of it.

The Ad Tier Is Just Cable With Extra Steps

The introduction of ad-supported tiers across virtually every major platform should have triggered a mass public reckoning. It didn't, mostly because it happened gradually enough that people just accepted it as normal. But let's be clear about what happened: streaming services convinced you to pay them money to watch ads. You are paying for the privilege of being advertised to. This is not a service. This is a hostage situation with a monthly billing cycle.

The ad tiers exist because the platforms realized they could effectively charge users twice—once for the subscription and once by selling their attention to advertisers. The "cheaper" ad tier isn't a discount. It's a different product that monetizes you more aggressively. The full-price tier is now the option that merely monetizes you through subscription fees. There is no tier where you are not being monetized. There is only the question of how.

The Piracy Renaissance Is Real and It's Justified

Here's the thing about piracy that the streaming industry doesn't want to acknowledge: people don't pirate because they hate paying for content. They pirate because the legitimate options have become worse than the illegal ones. When your $22/month subscription can't find the movie you want, requires you to navigate three different apps to watch your favorite director's filmography, and interrupts prestige drama with ads for car insurance, the moral calculus shifts considerably.

The rise of Jellyfin, Plex, and quietly resurgent torrent communities isn't nostalgia. It's a rational market response to services that have degraded past the point of acceptable value. Audiences tried the legitimate route. The legitimate route raised prices, added ads, cracked down on sharing, and then had the audacity to cancel beloved shows mid-season to avoid paying residuals.

The streaming revolution promised to kill cable. Instead, it became cable—fragmented, expensive, and contemptuous of the people paying for it. The only difference is that now the remote control has a better font. Somewhere in a Comcast boardroom, someone is laughing. And honestly, given everything, they've earned it.