Peacock is going up again. Every tier, including a $3 jump on Premium Plus. That’s the fourth increase in four years, which means anyone who signed up at launch pricing is now paying for a service they never actually agreed to buy.

The interesting thing isn’t the number. Three dollars is a coffee. What matters is the cadence. When a company raises prices once, that’s a correction. Twice, that’s inflation catching up. Four times in four years is a schedule, and schedules get set by finance teams who have run the numbers on how many subscribers walk out the door each time and decided the trade is worth it.

Churn Is a Feature Now

Streaming services used to be terrified of cancellations. The whole pitch to Wall Street was subscriber growth, and every quarterly report lived or died on net adds. That era ended somewhere around the point when everyone realized subscriber counts had plateaued and the only lever left was ARPU, average revenue per user. Once you optimize for revenue per subscriber instead of raw subscriber count, losing the price-sensitive tail is fine. Great, even. Those people were watching one show and cancelling anyway.

Peacock has a specific version of this problem. It is not a service people subscribe to year-round. It’s a service people subscribe to for the Olympics, for Sunday Night Football, for whatever WWE event is happening, and then forget to cancel for two months. NBCUniversal knows this. The pricing strategy is built for someone who signs up in a burst of enthusiasm and stays out of inertia.

The Bundle Endgame

Raising standalone prices every year does something else useful: it makes the bundle look like a bargain. Peacock is already tied up in packages with Netflix and Apple TV+ through Comcast’s StreamSaver, and every dollar added to the a la carte price widens the apparent gap. This is cable’s old playbook, run again with different logos. Individually expensive channels, packaged discount, one bill, and a customer who stops doing the math.

What’s genuinely different this time is the lack of reaction. In 2022 a Netflix price hike generated a week of coverage and a wave of cancellation threats. Now it’s a Tuesday. Consumers have absorbed the idea that streaming prices go up annually, the same way they absorbed it for gym memberships and phone plans. The outrage budget got spent.

What Would Actually Change This

Not cancellations. The only thing that reverses a pricing schedule is a competitor undercutting it hard enough to move share, and nobody in this market wants to fight that fight. Everyone’s margins are too thin and their content costs too high.

So the honest advice is boring: subscribe in bursts. Sign up for the month you actually want to watch something, then cancel. Annoying, sure. But the entire pricing model is a bet that you won’t bother, and the only way to lose the bet on their behalf is to bother.

Peacock Premium Plus, after this increase, costs more than Netflix’s ad-supported tier. Worth sitting with that for a second.