Weekly Roundup – November 25th, 2025
Roundup Links
Consumers are spending $22 more a month on average for streaming services. Why do prices keep rising?
"Six years ago, when San José author Katie Keridan joined Disney+, the cost was $6.99 a month, giving her family access to hundreds of movies like “The Lion King” and thousands of TV episodes, including Star Wars series “The Mandalorian,” with no commercials.
But since then, the price of an ad-free streaming plan has ballooned to $18.99 a month. That was the last straw for 42-year-old Keridan, whose husband canceled Disney+ last month.
“It was getting to where every year, it was going up, and in this economy, every dollar matters, and so we really had to sit down and take a hard look at how many streaming services are we paying for,” Keridan said. “What’s the return on enjoyment that we’re getting as a family from the streaming services? And how do we factor that into a budget to make sure that all of our bills are paid at the end of a month?”"
Our Take: The cable bundle deal in its heyday was massively profitable for companies. The cable bundle deal also generated consistent revenue returns year-on-year. This just is not the case with streaming platforms who deal with churn, mass unsubscribes, and ballooning rights costs. Plus, Wall Street is demanding a return on its investment. The logic was to get the audience hooked on their streaming platforms by offering their services at a premium discount, and then gradually ramping up the price. This is economics 101 stuff. The problem in this day and age is that there are numerous competing entertainment media types (tiktok, instagram, youtube, spotify, reddit, steam deck, chatgpt, Nextdoor, xbox live, nytimes, etc.) that one can enjoy instead. A lot of these services are free or are one-time costs. In the past you basically had the radio, cd player, vhs/dvd player, and maybe videogames to contend with cable tv. So when a user sees a price hike for a streaming platform and chooses to cancel they are probably making the calculation that they can find a cheaper or free media alternative that is just as engaging.
KROQ L.A.’s Rebound Is All About ‘Getting Back To What People Expect.’
"After years of struggling with ratings, ownership changes, and competition from iHeartMedia’s “Alt 98.7” KYSR, Audacy’s KROQ (106.7) Los Angeles is staging a notable comeback. The modern/alternative rock station, which shifted toward TikTok-driven alt-pop and lost its long-running “Kevin and Bean” morning show, now ranks second among adults 25-54, according to Nielsen’s October 2025 survey.
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KROQ, known as the “World Famous KROQ,” initially broke new wave acts such as Depeche Mode, The Clash, and Duran Duran in the 1980s, and later alternative/grunge artists like Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Pearl Jam. It was named Rolling Stone’s “Radio Station of the Year” in 1992 and 1993 and was inducted into the Rock Radio Hall of Fame in 2014.
Since his return, Weatherly has refocused on the alternative acts that defined KROQ’s heyday, targeting longtime listeners who grew up with Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Linkin Park, and Green Day. “During COVID, former Brand Manager Mike Kaplan pulled most of those acts from rotation in favor of TikTok-flavor-of-the-moment bands,” Weatherly says. “That’s not what people expect or want from KROQ. It’s just getting back to what people expect.”"
Our Take: A good portion of KROQ listeners weren't coming to hear a second-rate repackaging of whatever artist happens to be trending on TikTok or whatever track a celebrity/influencer chose to soundtrack some 15 second reel. KROQ is leveraging its original brand (as a breaker of basically all your favorite new wave/punk artists of the late 70s/early 80s, and the 90’s grunge era of alt rock) to connect with audiences that perhaps feel a little left behind in the chase for the next algorithm busting hit that you get with a lot of CHR formats. This is an example of station knowing its strengths and capitalizing on those strengths.
The Fate of Google’s Ad Tech Monopoly Is Now in a Judge’s Hands
"The federal judge, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, heard three hours of closing arguments on Friday from lawyers for the Justice Department and Google over the right way to fix the company’s monopoly in advertising technology. Now the decision is in the judge’s hands, and she said the ruling was likely to come next year.
The government has asked the court to force Google to spin off the technology that runs transactions between ad buyers and sellers, known as an ad exchange, and to share some data, among other measures. The company has countered with a narrower proposal."
Our Take: The fact the americans increasingly consult LLM’s (Large Language Models) like Chatgpt over traditional search will erode Google’s monopoly in ad tech more than any court order ever does or will do. Of course, this will eventually mean Chatgpt will become a monopoly in some fashion, and that baton will have merely traded hands.
‘Ens***tification’: how we got the internet no one asked for – podcast
"Do you ever get the feeling that the internet isn’t what it used to be?
Well, tech critic Cory Doctorow thinks you’re right – and he has a term to describe it too: ‘ens***tification’.
He lays out his three-step theory to Nosheen Iqbal, explaining why sites from Amazon to Google to Instagram seem to offer a worsening experience … and what can be done to stop it."
Our Take: The early internet and even the corporatized internet of the 2000’s was populated mostly by people and internet traffic was more organic and a lot less dependent on algorithms. The difference today is, of course, the proliferation of algorithms, but also that every fortune 500 company is aggressively invested in the online space as well. Where the internet used to be just humans hanging out, now it’s the corporations hanging out in those spaces as well, hence the ‘ens***tification’ of the internet. The internet was mostly “people talking,” not “platforms engineering engagement,” like it is today.
