Are We Paying More for Worse TV? How ‘Streamflation’ Broke the Streaming Dream

There was a wonderfully simple idea behind streaming television when it first began taking over our living rooms. Instead of paying for a huge television package filled with dozens of channels you barely watched, you could subscribe to something like Netflix, choose exactly what you wanted to watch and cancel whenever you liked. There were no schedules to worry about, no recording programmes because you were going out, and perhaps most importantly, no adverts interrupting the film just as something interesting was about to happen.

When Netflix launched in the UK in 2012, it cost £5.99 a month. For that relatively small payment, you received unlimited streaming from its catalogue of films and television programmes, and at the time it looked less like another television channel and more like the beginning of the end for traditional subscription television. Disney+ arrived in Britain eight years later at exactly the same £5.99 monthly price, offering Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and National Geographic under one subscription. The streaming dream seemed straightforward: more choice, lower prices and complete control over what you watched.

Fast forward to 2026 and the dream has become considerably more complicated.

One subscription became five

Netflix is no longer the place where almost everything eventually seems to appear. Disney created Disney+, Amazon expanded Prime Video, Apple entered the market, Sky developed NOW, Paramount launched Paramount+ and countless smaller services began carving out their own sections of film and television history.

That competition initially sounded like good news. More companies making television should theoretically mean more choice and better programmes, but it also produced something viewers had been trying to escape from in the first place: fragmentation. Want to watch one particular drama and you may need Netflix. Follow a Marvel series and you need Disney+. Another programme could be sitting behind NOW, while the film you want might only be available as a separate rental somewhere else.

Suddenly the question is no longer whether you subscribe to a streaming service, but how many.

Ofcom says around 70% of UK households now have at least one subscription video-on-demand service, although that figure has barely moved in recent years. What has continued growing is the money being generated. Pay-TV and subscription streaming revenues increased by more than £1 billion to reach £11.4 billion during 2025, with Ofcom specifically pointing towards price increases and bundled services as important reasons for that growth.

In other words, streaming companies are no longer finding millions of completely new households to subscribe. Increasingly, they need to make more money from the people already there.

The £5.99 television revolution isn't £5.99 anymore

Netflix provides perhaps the clearest illustration of how much things have changed. Its original UK service cost £5.99 a month in 2012. Today its cheapest UK plan costs £7.99 and includes adverts, while the advert-free Standard subscription costs £13.99. Anyone wanting the Premium package with 4K and HDR pays £20.99 a month.

Disney+ has followed a similar journey. The service launched in Britain at £5.99 a month in 2020. Six years later, £5.99 buys the Standard With Ads version, while Standard without conventional advertising costs £9.99 and Premium costs £14.99 per month.

Amazon Prime currently costs £8.99 a month or £95 a year and includes Prime Video alongside its delivery and other benefits. However, Prime Video introduced adverts into its standard service in 2024, with customers offered a separate monthly upgrade if they want most on-demand programmes without advertising.

NOW adds another variation on the same idea. Its flexible Entertainment membership is currently £7.99 a month, while Cinema costs another £9.99, and standard memberships include adverts unless customers add one of the company's Boost options.

Put only Netflix Standard, Disney+ Standard, Amazon Prime, NOW Entertainment and NOW Cinema together and the monthly bill reaches more than £50 before we have considered broadband, sport or any of the other streaming platforms available.

Nobody forces us to subscribe to all of them, of course, and that remains one of streaming's biggest advantages. You can cancel Netflix for a few months, subscribe to Disney+ while a particular series is running and move elsewhere when something interesting arrives. Yet that increasingly means managing television subscriptions almost like household utilities, regularly checking what you are paying for and whether you are actually using it.

That wasn't quite the effortless future we were originally promised.

And somehow the adverts came back

Perhaps the strangest part of streaming's evolution is the return of advertising.

One of the attractions of early streaming was that the programmes simply played. There was no five-minute advert break and no need to reach for the remote while somebody tried to sell you car insurance. Traditional commercial television depended upon advertising because viewers were not directly paying ITV or Channel 4 every month. Streaming appeared to offer a different bargain: we would pay for the service, and in exchange the adverts would disappear.

Now we can pay for the service and receive the adverts.

Netflix introduced its advertising-supported UK subscription in 2022, initially pricing it below its traditional plans. Amazon subsequently made limited advertising the standard Prime Video experience, while Disney+ also offers a cheaper advertising-supported membership. Ofcom's research has shown that advertising tiers have become increasingly popular as households look for ways to reduce subscription costs.

From the streaming companies' perspective, the logic is easy enough to understand. There are only so many households available to subscribe, while producing major television series and films is enormously expensive. Advertising creates another source of revenue without requiring another few million people to suddenly decide they need Netflix.

For viewers, however, there is an undeniable feeling that we have travelled in a rather large circle. We moved away from television packages partly because we disliked paying for channels containing adverts, and now advertising is steadily working its way back into the services that replaced them.

Are we actually getting worse television?

That part of the question is more difficult, because there has arguably never been more high-quality television available.

Streaming has funded programmes that traditional broadcasters might never have attempted, created international hits from shows that once would have struggled to travel beyond their home countries and given viewers instant access to enormous catalogues of entertainment. Even in 2026, Netflix remains hugely important to British viewing habits. Ofcom found that 26% of viewers now say Netflix is the first place they look when deciding what to watch, fractionally ahead of the BBC at 25%.

The problem may therefore be less about the quality of television and more about the quality of the experience around television.

Finding something to watch can involve searching several apps. A programme you watched last year may have moved to another service. Features that once came as standard can become attached to more expensive tiers, while different subscriptions offer different video quality, numbers of simultaneous screens and advertising arrangements.

The technology has become easier while the marketplace around it has somehow become more complicated.

We escaped the bundle, then rebuilt it ourselves

There is another irony appearing as streaming matures. Companies are increasingly bundling services together again.

Netflix can be included within Sky packages. Disney+ appears within telecommunications and television bundles. Amazon lets customers subscribe to additional streaming channels through Prime Video. Services that once encouraged us to break apart the traditional television package are increasingly discovering that customers quite like having everything collected together with one bill. Ofcom has noted that streaming companies are becoming increasingly dependent upon bundles with other communications providers as they attempt to attract customers and reduce cancellations.

In other words, after spending more than a decade dismantling the television bundle, the industry may slowly be inventing the television bundle again.

There are still important differences. Most streaming subscriptions remain easier to cancel than traditional long-term television contracts; we have far greater control over when we watch programmes, and nobody needs an engineer to install Netflix. Streaming has genuinely transformed television for the better in many respects.

But the original promise was not simply television delivered through the internet. It was supposed to be simpler television.

Instead, many households now have several monthly subscriptions, different programmes locked behind different services, cheaper packages supported by advertising and premium tiers required for some of the features viewers once assumed were part of the basic deal.

Perhaps the streaming revolution did defeat the old television model after all.

The problem is that, somewhere along the way, it started becoming remarkably good at impersonating it.