There was never a world in which TV companies like Disney and NBC could lose cable subscribers (yes comcast manages the subs, but they pay Disney and NBC carriage fees from subscription fees) and make streaming cheaper than cable. So if you are losing a lot of money via cord cutting, and then you have the expense of standing up your own streaming service... Yeah, it's going to probably cost the same as fees the cable company used to kick back to Disney. The difference is that if you want all the content from everyone, you need to then to get all the app subscriptions. However, you no longer get the bundled price that provided some discount via cable.

I don't know that there was ever a promise that streaming would be cheaper. It could be more a la carte, but the cost for the content was never going to change in the eyes of the tv companies that now have the added operation cost of maintaining an app.