Streaming's Slow Boil: How We Got Cooked and What We're Doing About It
An Italian court just ruled that Netflix unlawfully increased its prices, and consumers could be looking at refunds of up to 500 euros. Netflix, predictably, said they’ll appeal. And somewhere in a boardroom, I imagine a very expensive suit nodded slowly and said “of course we will.”
The online discussion this sparked has been fascinating — and honestly, a bit cathartic. Because a lot of us have been quietly stewing about this for years.
Cast your mind back to, say, 2013. Netflix was a revelation. One modest monthly fee and you had access to an enormous library of content. No ads, no tiers, no password-sharing crackdowns, no “sorry, that show has moved to Paramount+” nonsense. It felt genuinely revolutionary. I remember my wife and I cancelling Foxtel and feeling like we’d pulled off some kind of minor heist.
Fast forward to now. We’re paying significantly more, the library feels thinner in ways that actually matter, and somehow they’ve managed to introduce ads into a paid subscription product. Bold move, that.
What struck me reading through the comments on this Italy story was how clearly people have mapped out the trajectory. Someone laid it out simply: offer incredible value, gain critical mass, eliminate competition, then jack the prices. It’s a pattern we’ve seen play out across the tech industry repeatedly — and streaming is just the latest chapter.
Though honestly, the Netflix story is a bit more complicated than pure predatory pricing. When Netflix was cheap and the library was enormous, it was partly because studios were licensing their content for peanuts — they didn’t really grasp what streaming would become. Once they figured it out, they yanked their catalogues and launched their own services. Suddenly Netflix had to spend billions making original content just to stay relevant. Disney+, Paramount+, Stan, Binge — the whole ecosystem fractured. Now you need four or five subscriptions to watch everything you actually want, and each one costs more than Netflix did when it had everything.
So here we are. The price of “convenience” keeps creeping up, and the convenience itself keeps getting worse.
What I find genuinely interesting is the response from consumers. There’s a pretty clear split emerging. Some people are doing the rotation trick — subscribe for two months, binge what you want, cancel, move to the next service. Honestly? Respect the hustle. Others have gone back to physical media, which, given that Sony is apparently winding back Blu-ray production, feels a bit like a narrowing window. And then there’s the rather large and vocal group who’ve simply… returned to piracy. The jokes about “sailing the high seas” in every thread are funny, but they’re also a real signal. When you make your legitimate product expensive and worse, you’ve essentially handed people a moral justification to go around you.
The Italy ruling matters because it suggests that at least some legal systems are willing to push back on the idea that corporations can unilaterally change the terms of an ongoing subscription contract whenever it suits them. That’s actually a meaningful consumer protection argument. Here in Australia, our consumer law has provisions around unfair contract terms, and I’d love to see the ACCC take a closer look at how streaming services have been operating. It probably won’t happen quickly — regulatory action rarely does — but the Italian precedent is at least a data point.
There’s a broader economic pattern here too that’s worth naming. One commenter broke down Netflix’s 2025 financials in detail: $45 billion in revenue, $11 billion in profit, and $9 billion of that handed back to shareholders via stock buybacks. That’s not a company struggling to keep the lights on. That’s a company optimising for shareholder return while telling subscribers the price increases are necessary. It’s legal, it’s standard corporate behaviour, and it’s also exactly the kind of thing that erodes public trust in these platforms.
The hopeful bit — and I’m genuinely trying to find one — is that consumer behaviour does eventually force a response. The streaming market is showing real signs of saturation. Subscriber growth is slowing. People are cancelling. The Italian court ruling adds legal pressure from another direction entirely. None of this will flip overnight, but the era of “charge whatever you like and they’ll pay it” may have a shorter runway than Netflix’s boardroom currently believes.
In the meantime, I’ve been eyeing off a NAS build for a while. My old desktop is gathering dust in the study, and frankly, some of those second-hand hard drives on Marketplace are looking pretty attractive right now.