Streaming services are now worse than cable—here's how they trapped us

Sydney Butler

Sat, August 29, 2026 at 4:45 PM UTC

3D logos of Netflix, Disney Plus, Prime Video, Spotify, Crunchyroll, and Amazon Music, surrounded by cash and dollar bills on a bright blue background. — Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek

I cut the cord pretty early in the streaming game. Back then, I got my first broadband connection (4Mbps!) and was still using satellite TV to watch movies and TV series. After subscribing to Netflix, I canceled that contract and enjoyed years of paying a fraction of that fee to access a massive library.

It felt incredibly generous, but since then, streaming content has become fragmented, fees have gone up, and the number of services competing for your dollar has increased, but somehow hasn't made things better for the average consumer. In fact, all of these services spend their time thinking of ways to just squeeze an extra few cents out of your already empty pockets.

You'll pay extra to get rid of the ads

Paying for the privilege of peace and quiet

Streaming services keep making poor financial decisions, such as spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing original content that no one watches. All we want is to stream comfort shows , but we're too lazy to buy the DVD box sets and change discs ourselves.

So now services like Netflix offer "cheaper" tiers of streaming if you're happy to lose access to some content and spend cumulative hours of your life watching ads for things you're never going to buy. It's a win-win for the streaming company. They get to use the data they have on you to expose you to targeted ads, which make them oodles of money. If you (rightfully) think your time is worth more than the five bucks you save by switching to an ad-supported tier, that suits them too. More money is more money.

The good news is that there are still some streaming services that are completely ad-free , like these.

A 3D Apple TV icon floating over a desert landscape with sand dunes under a hazy sky.

The best picture and sound may require the most expensive plan

It costs money to get the most out of your TV

A TV and a color wheel in the center with the HDR10+ symbol. — Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek | UladzimirZuyeu / Shutterstock

4K TVs are finally becoming common, and 4K content is quite abundant now. Unfortunately, streaming services have decided that these are value-added features that you need to pay for if you want to enjoy them. So most of the reasonably priced streaming tiers' paywalls have 4K resolution and HDR.

Never mind that this top-tier quality can't actually compare with a real 4K HDR Blu-ray; modern content is already produced at 4K in HDR, so this means the streaming service has to deliberately give you lower-quality content to convince you to spend more.

The thing that really bugs me about it is that the vast majority of content on streaming services is too old to have HDR. In fact, most of it is too old to be in HD, much less 4K. That's simply because there are decades of movies and TV shows that are in SD.

Which means streaming companies are charging you a major price premium to access a tiny fraction of their libraries at full quality.

Watching on more screens can raise the price

Everyone has to gather around the big TV

An episode of 'Ugly Betty' playing on a Samsung Frame TV. — Bertel King / How-To Geek

This is somewhat connected to the 4K and HDR issue, with Netflix being a prime example. The way the pricing of the tiers is structured, having access to more than two simultaneous streams is tied to 4K and HDR. This means that even if you dislike 4K and HDR, if you want more than two people to have access to the service at once, you'll have to pay for it anyway.

Then again, maybe it's one way we can get everyone in the family together to watch things on one TV? There should be a silver lining somewhere, right?

Talk about a face-heel turn!

Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek

In 2019, we wrote that Netflix doesn't care if you share your password; then by 2023, the story had changed to how Netflix will stop you from sharing passwords . Now, the company has monetized this practice despite putting a stop to it earlier. You can pay to have an additional person who doesn't live with you added to the account. Although there's no actual saving of any sort, it's just a "convenience" so you can pay for your college-age kid or retirement-age parents to have something to watch.

This idea is spreading too. HBO Max is also going the way of asking you to pony up cash for outside members.

There has to be a better way

Deep down, we all knew it could last. Now that streaming services are as bad as the cable companies we left for them, it's time to find better alternatives. Of course, you can just host your own streaming service at home using Plex or Jellyfin. That's a popular hobby these days, and I love it.

Physical media is also coming back with a vengeance. It's the perfect time to buy that Star Trek box set or the copy of Friends you always meant to own. Even if your faves are on streaming, they'll be gone eventually, so go out and grab some discs before it's too late.

Check out Yahoo's latest streaming advice, based on hands-on testing.

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