Nearly every streaming service has seen a price increase this year alone.
Page B2From§Eachthe matinee edition — 31 August 2026
Tim Cook hands over Apple as company raises TV subscription price for the second time this year.
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: THE FLAT MONTHLY BILL
The flat monthly bill, a fixture of the streaming era, died this week, age approximately twelve, depending on which service you ask. It is survived by a higher bill, same login, same password you'll forget, and by several competing higher bills at other companies, all of whom took the news of its passing as an occasion to raise theirs too.…
…(cont) The flat monthly bill was born sometime around 2013, when streaming was pitched as the thing that would save you from cable's yearly creep. It lived a good run. It is preceded in death by the $7.99 tier, the $9.99 tier, and whatever the introductory rate was that got you to sign up in the first place, which nobody has seen since.
Its passing was announced the same week Apple's chief executive handed the reins to a successor, a coincidence the company did not remark upon and this reporter will not pretend to explain, except to note that a change at the top and a change at the register arrived close enough together that a fella starts to wonder if the two departments ever talk. Probably they do. Probably this is just how the numbers work now. That's not malarkey, that's just the filing.
There will be no successor for the flat bill. There is only the next bill, and the one after that, each introduced the same way the last one was: quietly, in a settings menu, with no ceremony and no press conference, because a price increase does not require a ribbon-cutting to take effect, it just requires you to keep paying.
He was a nice bill, while he lasted. Simple. You knew where you stood with him. What replaced him is not, strictly speaking, worse — it's just a number, and the number goes up, and it will keep going up under this chief executive same as it did under the last one, because that particular institutional memory, unlike the man who ran the place, does not get handed off. It just gets bigger.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you check your statement for the new number before the old one shows up on your card.
“They swap the CEO, keep the price going up — funny how leadership changes and your bill never does. That's the whole company in one sentence: doesn't matter whose name is on the door, the meter's still running on you.”
“Streaming content is expensive to produce, and if every service is raising prices this year that's just the market maturing, nothing coordinated about it. The leadership transition has nothing to do with the timing of the price increase — did I say nothing to do with, I mean, there's obviously no connection, why would there be.”
The receipts
Monday marks Tim Cook’s last day in his 15-year tenure as the chief executive of Apple, as he prepares to hand the reins to longtime executive and engineer John Ternus. The outgoing CEO expressed gratitude in his final memo to Apple…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.