I’ve been an active proponent of YouTube TV for the past two years. When I made the ultimate move to cut the cord and ditch the cable box for good, that was the live TV streaming service I chose for my sports. It had all the ESPNs, FOX Sports and the Big Ten Network, which meant I was covered for football, hockey and anything else. I signed up for that $39.99 a month, went to Internet modem only on my Xfinity service and never looked back.

They bumped it up to $49.99 last year when they added the Discovery channels like HGTV, TLC, DIY Network and of course, The Discovery Channel. I missed being able to watch Fixer Upper, so I was glad for the addition, even with a $10 price hike. My praise of the service continued unabated.

So when news of the latest price hike for YouTube TV went public, I knew what was going to happen. Sure enough, I was tagged, emailed and messaged the same question by people who know how much of a YouTube TV disciple I am:

“Are you gonna stick with YouTube TV now that it’s $65 a month?”

Yes. Yes I am. Next question.

Alright, I’ll tell you why. It’s not because Google is paying me to be a YouTube TV shill, though I wish they were. That’d be a nice source of secondary income.

No, it’s because the service still gives me everything I’m looking for with live TV streaming, it’s still cheaper than what I would be paying for a digital preferred cable package, and even though $15 is higher than I was expecting for the increase, I understand perfectly why it’s happening.

The lazy answer is the one I saw all over Twitter: Greed. Thank you Captain Obvious. Name me one corporate entity, streamer or otherwise that isn’t greedy. Trick question, they don’t exist.

Since streaming really started to take off in the past few years, the perception has been that the biggest reason to cut the cord was to save money because the apps were cheaper than even a basic cable package. The thing is, while that was true at the time, it was never going to stay true for that long.

To begin with, everyone has a different idea of what a basic cable package is, including the cable companies themselves. Trying to downgrade your package with them in many cases is more difficult than finding your way out of a hedge maze and you may very well have to threaten cancelling your service just to get it done, but there are so many packages and variations as well as add-ons that it can be tricky to get down to an actual “basic” package that is as cheap as possible, while still giving you all the channels you actually want to watch.

For me, my channels ranged all over the place so the lowest I could get was $99, and even then I ended up moving back up a notch to get back some channels I lost that I didn’t know I missed, so it was $150 to $180 a month for my cable, which included 2 boxes, broadcast fees and other silly fees that come with having TV broadcast into your home.

Those fees don’t exist with an internet modem, and I appreciate that. Plus, none of the live TV streamers of note have reached $100 pricing for any of their packages yet, though there are some that you can bundle with add-ons that will get you there if not at least close.

I don’t have to worry about that with YouTube TV because I’m not big on their add-ons like Showtime or Cinemax, I already have HBO Max separately, and the channels they just added are Viacom networks, so that means Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Paramount, TV Land, MTV, VH1 and BET. Those are all bigger networks, so I get the price hike completely.

The thing is, this is what is going to happen with all of the streaming networks eventually, starting with the ones that dabble in live TV and then moving to the ones that deal in On Demand. The more content rights you get, the more you have to shell out for them and the more you pass the costs onto the customer. No one likes a higher bill, but it makes logical business sense. The risk you run is if you have a customer that was on the fence between you and another service, like Fubo or Hulu, and they couldn’t care less about Viacom channels, so now they’ll ditch you for one of the other services.

Ok, cool. You stuck it to YouTube TV and made them pay for jacking up your rate. Now what? You go to Fubo or Hulu Live that is only $10 cheaper and might require some add-ons to get to what YouTube TV was giving you? Or maybe you’ve decided to scale back permanently just to save that extra $10. Good luck with that the first time you miss a channel you forgot you had access to before. On top of that, what are you going to do when the other service you ditched YouTube TV for has their own price hike, which is inevitable as they all add services as well? Will you go crawling back to YouTube TV or will you reconnect your cord and go back to cable? I saw a lot of people claiming that when this news came down.

Let’s say you do that. You call Xfinity and get your regular service back, boxes, fees and all. You’re really just prolonging the inevitable when you’ll have to ditch all that equipment again in the next decade.

What people are missing about The Streaming Wars is that they are really not competing against cable at this point. They are becoming cable themselves. This isn’t a price war, it’s the evolution of the industry itself. By 2030 or much earlier, you won’t even have coaxial cable hookups and cables in your home for TV, you’ll just have Ethernet and wireless connections, because cable is slowly but surely becoming streaming.

That’s why these live TV providers are making new deals to get more channels, and why their price hikes are happening. The broadcast networks who see the writing on the wall, but can’t ditch live TV just yet, are finding homes on the streaming services for a decent price as more people cut the cord. This won’t help the cable providers, but it will help the studios and networks who don’t want to lose their audiences just because they weren’t on a streaming service.

ESPN actually hiked up their streaming price as well, but it was only $1. Hardly anything for people to get upset about. Over the years though, expect that price to only go up as the transition from cable to streaming continues, and you end up paying for ESPN+ by itself at the same price you would have paid for it on cable, but now cable isn’t an option for it anymore. That day will come in the next 5 to 10 years, book it.

So with all this in mind, there’s no need for me to get angry at YouTube TV and ditch my service. I’m not going to the other ones, I dig the unlimited DVR I’m still getting that the other ones don’t offer, I like the new channels and I didn’t get it in the first place just to pay a wildly cheaper bill than cable. I got it also because I saw which way the wind was blowing with the industry, and I was more than ready to switch sides ahead of the inevitable changeover. Do I want to pay $64.99 a month going forward? Of course not, no one likes price hikes, but $64.99 is still a lot cheaper than $150 to $180 for the cable packages I used to own. Even adding the $54 for internet it’s still only $119 altogether, and I don’t count the other apps I pay for because I would be paying for them even if I had a cable package, which will be a streaming package at some point in the not too distant future.