Streaming services are raising prices and cutting catalogs. Subscribers are doing the math.

Four of the largest streaming services raised prices this year, by an average of 18 percent across their standard tiers. Over the same period the combined number of titles available on those services fell by about 11 percent.

Both moves have the same cause. Licensing catalog content costs money whether anyone watches it or not, and the services have concluded that a smaller catalog of things people actually finish is worth more than a large one that flatters the marketing.

Subscribers noticed

Monthly churn across the four has reached 6.3 percent, the highest figure the tracking firms have recorded. Roughly a fifth of cancellations come from accounts that resubscribe within ninety days — the pattern analysts call cycling, where a household joins for a series and leaves when it ends.

Services have tried to blunt this with annual plans, bundled offers and staggered weekly releases. Weekly release schedules do extend a subscription by an average of about three weeks, which is precisely why almost every service has adopted them.

We stopped selling a library and started selling a schedule. The schedule is what keeps the card on file.— A programming executive at a large streaming service

What disappears

The titles that leave are rarely the ones anybody debates. They are mid-catalog films and older series with modest but steady viewership, where the license cost exceeds the retention value the service can attribute to them.

For viewers, the practical effect is that a title watched last year may be unavailable this year at any price, because the rights have reverted and no one has re-licensed them. Archivists have been warning about this for a decade; it is now visible to ordinary subscribers.

• Prices: up about 18% year over year across four large services
• Catalogs: down about 11% over the same period
• Churn: 6.3% monthly, the highest recorded
• Cycling: roughly a fifth of cancellations resubscribe within 90 days

Two services have begun licensing selected titles to a rival rather than removing them entirely, an arrangement that would have been unthinkable three years ago. Executives at both described it in nearly identical terms: a title earning something on someone else’s platform is better than a title earning nothing on a hard drive.