Streaming prices have surged nearly 70% in four years, and they're still going up

If I had to guess, Netflix being a publicly traded company have incentives to produce better operating expenses. This gives them access to cash and lending at lower rates. When they return better operating expenses, bank and hedge analysts buy more equity, driving equity value up. This effectively gives shareholders more money, unrealized.

If you look at CPI data and Greenstreet Property Price Index, you’ll see energy, compute, rent (or property tax), and professional services have all increased dramatically in cost. In order to keep the operating expense ratios to be competitive in the public stock market, they must raise prices. Otherwise they wont be earning enough revenue or good enough margins on operating expense.

Operating expense are accounted for differently than capital expense like building a new data center or hiring a bunch of temp labor to build their product or investing in cybersecurity, so they can still spend on these categories without big impact to their stocks, because it helps improve their competitive posture.