ESPN+ and UFC PPV Prices Going Up Is Sign Of What's to Come in Streaming Wars

After disposing of Proposition Joe in The Wire, Marlo Stanfield ended the cooperative syndicate meetings the murdered drug dealer had presided over and concluded with a final message: "One more thing. The price of the brick going up."

I think about that line every time we read a new headline about rising prices in the streaming wars. As noted by Variety, UFC PPVs are going from $64.99 to $69.99 and the annual price of ESPN+ -- which you need to watch the UFC PPVs, and a growing number of pro and college sports that will include SEC football games season -- is rising from $49.99 to $59.99.

This follows the news that Disney+ is going from $6.99 to $7.99 per month. In October, Netflix went up $1 per month on its standard plan and $2 per month on premium plans to $14 and $18, respectively.

These are all signs of what's to come. The streaming platforms are all trying to get people hooked on their product before raising the prices. The economics dictate that the prices have to rise because many of these streamers have been charging less for content than they are paying for it. Even the ones that aren't selling at a loss have stocks that are trading at multiples that have huge profit growth baked in and lots of debt to pay down.

It's hard to say when the saturation point will come, especially as smaller streaming providers start to lose subscribers and/or get forced to consolidate. The inevitable consolidation will come in the form of merged companies but could also be a re-bundling that could resemble the cable and satellite TV bundle that 20 million customers have left in the past five years.

By the way, even as they are losing subscribers, the cable companies are raising their prices. Comcast, for example, is raising TV prices about $6.50 per month, beginning tomorrow. Clearly, given the 20 million people who have left cable, all of the content fragmentation has caused many consumers to make choices about what to add, what to keep, and what to lose. This is only going to intensify as the streaming platforms keep moving in the direction of charging according to what the content costs to provide.