Binge-watching? Beware data caps

If you have autoplay enabled on your Netflix or Amazon Prime account, listen up: it could cost you hundreds of dollars a year if you’re not careful. ew services like Disney+ offer us unfettered access to most of the gems of the Disney vault, along with Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars and 20th Century Fox, with the expectation that we'll watch them for hours. But while the price is right for Disney+ at $6.99 monthly, many of us didn't expect our monthly internet rates to go up as well. For years, we've been subscribing to cable TV and letting the set run all day long, without ever hearing about overages. For streaming, that's changed, and Luke Bouma, the editor of CordCuttersNews, chalks it up to being a new kind of "profit center," for the same companies that have been selling you cable TV services for years. "It's a hidden tax," he says. "Another way to make extra money off you." Comcast, the nation's largest cable and internet provider, says it offers 1 terabyte of data consumption monthly. The extra $10 for overages would get you another 50 GB of data, equal to another 150 hours of viewing.