$311 a month: How much your streaming addiction is costing you

Subscriptions to all the mainstream streaming services is much more than a traditional Foxtel package. (Source: Getty)

Your content addiction could be costing you as much as $311.53 a month to subscribe to all streaming services.

This amounts to a whopping $3,738 a year to watch trashy soaps, obscure sporting events and the hottest new dramas.

According to comparison website Finder, that’s how much it will cost you for every single streaming platform available in Australia.

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But it will still set you back around $147 a month - $1,763 a year - to subscribe to all the mainstream titles, including Netflix, Stan and Disney+.

Netflix was the number one streaming platform in Australia as of February last year, with 69 per cent of people subscribed to the service.

Stan was the next most popular (36 per cent), followed by Amazon Prime (32 per cent) and Disney+ (32 per cent).

These figures dwarf the average Foxtel HD subscription, which is now at $69 a month with no lock-in contract.

Back in 2008, a Foxtel HD subscription cost as little as $6.95 per week.

The days of password sharing are numbered

Many of us get around these steep streaming fees by sharing passwords with parents, partners and friends.

In fact, Finder research from early last year revealed 44 per cent of Aussies borrow at least one streaming service from a friend or family member.

But streaming giant Netflix has introduced a penalty fee of around $4 (US$3) a month in some countries if users are sharing their passwords across multiple households.

It’s not clear if this will be rolled out in Australia, but it could signal an end to the free-for-all account sharing we’ve all gotten used to.

Bundles are back, baby

Before streaming rose to prominence in the late noughties, TV lovers typically had a cable TV subscription (Foxtel) that granted them access to a bunch of different channels.

Now, it’s become more common for people to subscribe to swathes of different streaming services and hop between them as attractive content becomes available.

According to Quartz, we are starting to see these streaming services packaged back up again in bundles.

For example, in the US, Disney is now offering several of its streaming services - Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+ - as a discounted bundle.

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