Here’s my take on subscription prices going way up (more than inflation), and it’s a socio-economic one. Back in the good old days of the US of A, you had three classes: low-income, middle class, the rich. Back to today, the middle class is pretty much gone. The lucky ones with good jobs are paid like the riches, the rest is now on minimum wage or worse, homeless.
The companies providing us services know that and they know that the subscribers who are on the low-end of the income spectrum are going to flee anyway. The customers they’re interested in are the ones who just spend money and don’t care how much they spend. I happen to know a few of them, when I go visit them and want the kids to watch TV they tell me they have “everything” which usually include Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, AppleTV+ and a few more. Rarely sports by the way (yes they're the "intellectual" types and have good jobs paying outrageous amounts of money). When I ask which subscriptions they have, they answer evasively because they actually don’t remember which services they pay. And when I ask what they watch, they either answer that they actually don’t watch anything or maybe one show/serie and that’s it! No time to watch, work, work, work…
And there’s the miracle of subscriptions… and these are the customers the Netflix of the world want, the ones who will pay any price for anything and for the long run because after a few months they don’t know they’re paying.
