This week, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a law forbidding ads that play on streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max, and YouTube from being louder than the content they interrupt, meaning that Californians will no longer be startled by blaring commercials asking if they’re satisfied with their car insurance. The reason advertisers crank up the volume on their ads is obvious: they’re hoping the sudden burst of noise will make viewers pay attention, which is very annoying. I’m glad someone did something about it.
But given how streaming is getting worse and worse these days — even high-powered Hollywood executives have admitted that it can be a “terrible consumer experience” — little fixes like this feel like a Band-Aid on a gaping gut wound. When, consumers want to know, is someone going to address the bigger problems that are making streaming such a pain?
Rising prices
Content will cost you
Netflix launched its first streaming plan way back in the early 2010s. For $7.99 per month, you could stream anything you wanted for as long as you wanted.
In 2025, that level of access will cost you $17.99 per month. Netflix has always been a leader in the streaming world, and other services have followed its lead. Just this year, Disney+, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Discovery+, Peacock, and HBO Max have all raised prices.
Even for people who love TV and movies, subscribing to every or most streaming services is becoming an unbearable financial burden. At one point, people could get around this by sharing passwords with friends and family — one person pays for Netflix, another for Disney+, and everyone passes around their passwords so the cost is spread out. But services like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max have all cracked down on the practice. That’s a far cry from 2017, when Netflix tweeted that, “Love is sharing a password.”
It feels like the days when streaming services were trying to woo customers are over; we’ve now entered the phase where they’re trying to bilk people for every dollar they’re worth. That’s particularly galling when the actual experience of watching a movie or TV show on streaming is getting worse.
More ads
A subscription doesn’t buy what it used to
To be fair to Netflix, the company still offers a plan where you can access the service at the original price of $7.99 per month. The catch is that you now have to endure advertisements. For someone like me, who got so used to watching Netflix without ads that I assumed it would be that way forever, seeing a commercial in the middle of Stranger Things is deeply surreal, particularly because many shows in the streaming era aren’t built with ad breaks in mind. On streaming, commercials don’t start to play after some carefully crafted cliffhanger like they do on network TV; more often than not, they start up in the middle of a sentence, which is weird and off-putting.
I expect that streaming shows will eventually start to build in space for ad breaks again, but the fact that we have to watch ads at all is irritating. And the problem is getting worse. Amazon Prime Video didn’t raise the price on its ad tier this year, which is nice, but it did double the number of ads shown, which sucks.
One of the biggest issues here is that most people can remember a time when streaming was an ad-free experience across the board. With ads popping up more and more, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that streaming is degrading. Maybe people wouldn’t be as frustrated if ads had been a part of the streaming experience from the beginning, but that ship has long since sailed.
Diffusion of content
It’s impossible to find everything you want in one place
All of these changes would be easier to stomach if the shows and movies people wanted to watch were all easily and painlessly accessible, but it hasn’t been like that for a long time. Take the example of long-running sitcoms, which remain hugely popular and may be propping up the whole streaming business. There was a time when you could watch episodes of Friends, The Office, and Bob’s Burgers all on Netflix. That’s hundreds of episodes of comfort TV all in one spot. Now Friends is on HBO Max, The Office on Peacock, and Bob’s Burger’s on Hulu. Netflix picked up Seinfeld so it at least still had a dog in the fight, but it was a lot better for consumers when there wasn’t a fight at all.
So when once people had one subscription to manage, now they have upwards of 10. When once they could assume that everything they wanted to watch would be on Netflix or not available at all, now they have to ask the internet where this or that show is streaming. More passwords to remember, more price increases to keep tabs on…what was once easy is now something you need a spreadsheet to keep track of. The glory days of streaming are most definitely over.
Streamers vs customers
As frustrating as modern streaming can be, there are still good reasons to keep services like Netflix. But with all these problems, the drawbacks may soon start to outnumber the benefits. Some people are already jumping ship; there’s been a huge increase in piracy over the past few years, which just so happens to coincide with these price spikes and ad deluges. Streaming has been around for a while now and many of the big companies assume customers can’t go without it, but if they don’t make changes (or if lawmakers don’t change things for them), they may find themselves without a customer base to annoy.
The new law banning loud ads will go into effect in California on July 1, 2026. Hopefully by then, someone will be working on these other problems too.
