With Streamer Subscription Costs Rising, Does Money Buy Good TV?
Every major streaming service has raised the price of ad-free subscriptions in the last year. Ranker Insights data can tell us which streamers have the content that’s worth the money.
Industry-wide consolidation, monthslong strikes in Hollywood, stubborn inflation. You could blame the rising cost of streaming subscriptions on any number of culprits, but the bottom line for customers is that cutting the cord is no longer a guarantee of cutting costs.
It started in October 2022, when Apple TV+ raised the price of subscriptions for the first time ever, from $4.99 to $6.99 a month. The following January, Max, then still called HBO Max, hiked the cost of its ad-free plan by $1 a month. Then came Paramount+ in June, eliminating the cheaper of its two ad-free tiers, followed by Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Peacock in August. Whether streaming has actually become more expensive than cable packages depends on a wide range of factors, but it’s certainly not a no-brainer. If the era of Peak TV asked viewers to decide what shows were worth their time, this new era is forcing them to decide which ones are worth their money.
The data in the above graph comes from Ranker Insights data gathered in September, though some of the listed subscription costs didn’t officially kick in until October. Sentiment scores represent the ratio of positive reactions — Likes, Loves, and Favorites — to negative reactions — Dislikes — that users have given a particular show on Watchworthy over the last month. The scores along the axis represent the average sentiment score each show in a given streamer’s catalog got in September: for example, the average Disney+ show had a sentiment score of 80.6%, meaning that 80.6% of the reactions given by users to Disney+ series were positive.
What jumps out most immediately from these findings are the highest and lowest average sentiment scores. Apple leads the pack with an average score of 84.3%, helped by beloved shows like Blackbird, Hijack, and Shrinking, which boast sentiment scores of 98%, 97%, and 96%, respectively. The streamer does have less popular titles, with Hello, Tomorrow! earning a 55% score, but Apple’s sentiment score is consistently high because its most popular shows win over commanding majorities of its viewers. Most notable of all is that access to Apple’s library of original content costs less than an ad-free subscription to any other streaming service, meaning subscribers are getting the content they’re most likely to love for the lowest price.
The drawback for Apple is its comparatively tiny library: with just 145 titles, it’s six times smaller than the next smallest catalog, that of Disney+. On the other hand, Amazon Prime Video has the largest library of any streamer with 2,600 shows, and it offers the second highest average sentiment score and the second lowest subscription price ($8.99 is what Amazon charges users who want to use Prime Video without becoming Amazon Prime members). Users who want tons of titles to choose from for a slightly higher price might opt for Amazon over Apple.
Perhaps most surprising is the fact that Netflix, among the most expensive of the streamers, is also the worst-reviewed among our users in September. Netflix has a philosophy on content that runs completely contrary to that of Apple’s — where Apple pumps a lot of money into a relatively small slate of shows, Netflix is known for an approach that favors quantity, putting out dozens of new original series every year. That’s why its content library is nearly as large as Amazon’s. But while originals like Wednesday and The Night Agent got sentiment scores of over 90%, the streamer was weighed down by shows like That ’90s Show and Space Force, which got sentiment scores of 54% and 57%, respectively.
Our takeaway from these findings is that higher cost doesn’t translate into better content — in fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. Streamers with ad-free subscriptions on the more expensive side like Hulu, Netflix, and Disney+ had the lowest three sentiment score averages. Max was an exception, with the third highest score and second highest cost, though given its reputation for high-quality programming, one still has to wonder if it underperformed.
All this should be taken with a grain of salt. The range of sentiment scores here is pretty small, covering a total of just under 5%. But with costs going up across the board and TV fans being forced to make some difficult decisions, even the smallest differences can be important.