In less than a year, Denis Legault and Marie Beauchamp, from Sainte-Thérèse, saw their Apple TV+ subscription bill double. With two significant increases, this service launched in 2019 by Apple to compete with Netflix will now cost them $129 instead of $59.99.
“I think it’s really exaggerated,” says Mr. Beauchamp. The content has not doubled, and the series are not renewed quickly. It’s becoming less and less interesting. »
Mr. Legault and M.me Beauchamp are far from being the only ones in their situation. The latest news, according to the 2022 Digital Portrait of Quebec Households, 68% of Quebecers subscribe to at least one online viewing platform. Many, like the couple from Sainte-Thérèse who also subscribe to Netflix, have more than one service. Almost all of them have suffered steep increases in recent years.
These, according to a compilation carried out by The Press, often far exceed inflation. We have excluded from this calculation the new recent formulas, less expensive but which impose advertising on the viewer.
Netflix, for example, launched in Canada in 2010 at a monthly rate of $7.99. If the bill had kept pace with inflation, the subscription for the basic service would be $10.79 today. Instead, it costs $16.49, or 35% more than the price adjusted for inflation.
Costly, production
The prize for this increase greater than inflation goes to Crave. Opened in 2016 to all Canadians, no longer just Bell subscribers, at a monthly cost of $7.99, this service would today be $9.82 if it had kept up with inflation. However, Crave’s “Premium” package, without advertising, costs $19.99 in 2023, a “premium” of 51%.
Five of the seven services analyzed find themselves in this situation, to varying degrees. Only ICI Tou.tv EXTRA has escaped the trend by maintaining the same price of $6.99 since its launch in 2014. Prime Video, an atypical platform since it is offered in a package of services, has practically kept up with inflation , exceeding it by barely 2%.
Himself a big consumer of these platforms, keeping Netflix and Prime Video at all times and alternating between Apple TV+ and Disney+, the techno columnist Bruno Guglielminetti has suffered these price shocks. “It affects our wallet, each increase hurts: few customers are satisfied with just one service,” summarizes the host of the digital news podcast My notebook.
Essentially, the platforms justified the increases by the growing cost of producing television content, a very real phenomenon. These in-house productions are now essential with the appearance of numerous competitors on Netflix.
Before, production costs were low, we were mainly talking about acquisition costs. It started with House of Cardsthis is where Netflix took a liking to it and saw the impact that an in-house production could have.
Bruno Guglielminetti, techno columnist
Additionally, as with any cloud business, cloud platforms streaming must juggle an increase in demand for data, particularly with the generalization of 4K, combined with the soaring cost of servers. An indication provided last spring by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC): the Canadian household today consumes on average 396 gigabytes of data per month. This is double the consumption of 2019.
“The platforms have a lot of costs to absorb, and the latest collective agreement for screenwriters and actors in Hollywood will result in even greater costs,” believes Mr. Guglielminetti. The quickest way for them to obtain financing is to increase their rates. »
Regarding Apple TV+, another explanation emerges. Since 2020, we have been actively promoting the Apple One combined service, which offers for $10 more a music catalog of 70 million songs, 180 games and 50 GB of storage. “They want to favor those who take the full package, there is a little strategy behind that to force people to consume,” believes Denis Legault.