Many more people are jumping from one streaming subscription to another, a behavior that could have big implications for the entertainment industry.
…
Americans are getting increasingly impulsive about hitting the cancellation button on their streaming services. More than 29 million — about a quarter of domestic paying streaming subscribers — have canceled three or more services over the last two years, according to Antenna, a subscription research firm. And the numbers are rising fast.
The data suggests a sharp shift in consumer behavior — far from the cable era, when viewers largely stuck with a single provider, as well as the early days of the so-called streaming wars, when people kept adding services without culling or jumping around.
Among these nomadic subscribers, some are taking advantage of how easy it is, with a monthly contract and simple click of a button, to hopscotch from one service to the next. Indeed, these users can be fickle — a third of them resubscribe to the canceled service within six months, according to Antenna’s research.
“In three years, this went from a very niche behavior to an absolute mainstream part of the market,” said Jonathan Carson, the chief executive of Antenna.
Subscribe? You mean torrent?
Sonarr, the TV channel with everything.
Cancel all services
Get Stremio + Torrentio + Debrid
Enjoy lifeIn three years, this went from a very niche behavior to an absolute mainstream part of the market
It’s because of the fracturing of the marketplace. For a while there were only a few major Film/TV streaming services. Netflix and Hulu, then HBO and Amazon, and a handful of niche or genre platforms.
Then around the pandemic time, every network and their mother decided to pull their licensing to start their own streaming platform or several. The platforms all cost as much or more as before, but you need more of them to watch the different IP you are interested in.What the studios don’t realize (or won’t publicly admit) is that instead of replacing cable TV, they have effectively recreated the video rental industry.
Laughing in Plex server
Plex is deep in the enshitification process. I’d consider spinning up Jellyfin alongside it so you switch relatively painlessly when you decide that Plex’s bullshit has gone too far.
Even if you never reach that point, it’ll be useful to have a media server that won’t lock you out if you ever lose your Internet connection for an extended period of time
No reason they can’t run alongside each other, in case your concerned about resources or storage.
You can change the settings in Plex and still access it locally without Internet connection. But yeah Plex is kinda behind the curve on a lot of things, although jellyfin has it’s own issues
Plex requires an account and that account has to connect to an external Plex authentication server every so often. If that token expires and you have no internet, you will be locked out of your Plex.
You can disable auth on your local network. I’ve never experienced any issues with my authentication token expiring without having Internet, and I had my Plex server offline for months last year while I was living in a place that didn’t have Internet. For some reason though it runs noticeably shittier without Internet, it takes a long time for a video file to load.
I couldnt get jelly to see my external drives
I agree with you; Plex is completely enshittified. Unfortunately, Jellyfin still lacks apps for some platforms, even though they recently added webOS (old versions included) so the situation is slowly getting better.
Laughs in VLC and HDMI out
Mark my words. They will be switching to the car insurance model soon. You will have to pay for blocks of time. 3 mos, 6 mos, 12 mos. Probably also demand to be able to debit your bank acct. directly.
It’s already 1 month or 12 months. The obvious gap-filler there is to charge more for new activations. New subscribers are $25.99 for the first month, then only $16.99/month after.
When this happens I hope PayPal or Klarna has a usable emulant I can give Netflix so they’ll fuck off AND not get power to my actual banking.
Have you tried Bittorrent with Proton VPN? It’s great for downloading Linux ISOs. I know that’s not related to this conversation, I just felt like you might want to download some Linux ISOs.
Also https://1337x.to has a great directory of Linux ISOs you can download.
I’ve been waiting for the services to start requiring a year commitment or something equally dumb to prevent this behavior. I subscribe under two conditions : There is something I want to watch, and all the episodes are available. Once I’ve finished the content I subbed for, what is my incentive to stick around, exactly?
Unfortunately for streamers they can only churn out a season of my favorite shows every 2-3 years, and I’m not really about paying for availability to content that doesn’t interest me. Especially while those rates have doubled and tripled.
[Streaming services raising prices, producing garbage, canceling good shows, losing access to shows, straight-up deleting entire shows for a tax write off.]
“Why have consumers suddenly changed in only three years??? Inexplicable!”
This is a good thing. No matter how they try to paint it. I only stuck with some when interest and content waned because I was grandfathered in. When Netflix etc. took that away it made dumping them an easy decision. Not an “impulsive” one. There’s no point in being loyal to these companies. Especially when they pulled this shit after previously they claimed we were locked in on that pricing and started forcing ads. Greedy bastards.
Netflix is the only one I don’t cancel but I get a free sub through my provider. The rest come and go at my whims.
I really don’t understand why streaming business are so surprised. They are providing television for rent and users are renting it plain and simple.They seem to think they are entitled to lengthy subscriptions from users when in reality they aren’t providing a service that’s even stable or worth it.
I would be happy to keep subscribing for a reasonable price. But I’m starting to trim the fat as they continue to price gouge.
Exactly. I want to watch 1 show and when I’m done I’m cancelling. I’m looking at your paramount plus.
What you mean the Star Trek streaming service with some extra stuff no on cares about?
Originally we went to get to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race but it doesn’t have the current season even though its the main attraction. Then when I saw that some Star Trek wasn’t on it we canceled within a week.
Paramount+ is especially bad. Tiny selection, mostly shit, costs as much as the other services.
My wife wanted to watch the Grammys and when we saw it was on Paramount Plus we got it for 1 day. Afterwards I bought a 25 dollar over the air antennae so we can watch live CBS on the local affiliate for the once per year when we want to watch live TV. Isn’t worth it pretty much ever
Agreed. I have that shit for free because of where I work and have yet to watch a single thing on it. I mean there’s things I would’ve watched ideally, but my tastes have changed where I don’t want to revisit some things. Ah yes, they have the fucking Golf Masters on there. Paramount Plus’ selection looks like the home of all of those mundane shows you’d commonly find on cable TV. The ones you skip a lot of the time. They’re all here in one package that almost nobody wants unless they want to tap into nostalgia for some of the other ones, like the Nick shows.
And no Anime at all either.
they thought star trek would carry it… when that didn’t work, they shopped some of those titles around to play elsewhere and don’t even have their entire flagship franchise available anymore.
And the only new Star Trek show in the pipeline? A YA Starfleet Academy show starring Commandant Tilly.
Paramount+ ate the children’s entertainment app Noggin, which was primarily a streaming media and games app for the Nickelodeon crowd. It was commercial free, highly curated, and generally an exciting thing for the kids to open up and use to discover stuff like STEM games that were actually fun. Enshittification merged Noggin into Paramount, removed the recommendation algorithm geared towards kids, and shut down the Noggin app. Now Paramount is the only option and it’s horrible.
Users: Fine if you want me to pay a monthly fee I’ll only pay 3 months of the year.
Streaming services: ShookThe Netflix model was only ever really sustainable as long as there was only one or two providers. As long as there was only Netflix people were quite happy to just stay with the subscription because all of the content was on one convenient platform.
If I want to watch popular shows and how I have to subscribe to five or six services. Why would I do that if they are all still going to be there in a couple of months.
The Netflix model was only ever really sustainable as long as there was only one or two providers
The netflix model of streaming for cash was sustainable. The practice of gouging to where people will churn, that’s more widespread and an expected result.
The moment that I wasn’t allowed to do with my 6 accounts what I want to do, it was done for me.
if they are all still going to be there in a couple of months.
That’s the beauty of Netflix. They won’t.
They usually keep new shows at least for a year. And I suppose after that there’s no possible way of watching that content ever again, it’s lost into oblivion and certainly not available to download from a large number of locations.
Oh well
You’re probably being theoretical, but they’re definitely not surprised. Any actual confusion as to why an article like this can be cleared up when you consider the author isn’t really talking to us. Try reading it as if it’s a business brief, talking about us as a ‘problem’ that must be addressed. That ‘problem’ is we users are getting more value from the current model than was calculated by corporate.
Soon there will be another article (also addressing the room as if we’re not part of the discussion) detailing how corporate managed to “fix” it, and the revenue increases it brings. The other companies will follow suit to thunderous applause
Not a chance that’s gonna last. The next step is you must buy 3,6, or 12 months at a time. We already have streaming services doing channels and ad breaks. Cableless TV will be the circle completing.
Sounds like streaming services should start doing automatic credit checks on sign up. Then jumping around would result in lowering credit score, just like jumping around cell providers. And they should all do it around the same time coincidentally.
I’m ready to accept an exorbitant consulting fee now. 💵🫲
Removed by mod
site:github.com radarr sonarr docker
The hard part is saving for all the expensive hard drives. That’s my next step.
You can use the money you saved by cancelling your streaming services. assuming an average of two streaming services thats like £22 a month.
Secondhand electronics shops sell used hard drives dirt cheap.
I wouldn’t trust those drives with any data i want to keep but if it’s just movies that could be redownloaded then who cares?
A couple months down the line you could add redundant drives and then re-downloading isn’t even a consideration any more. dead drive? pull it, replace it, sync… done
With the added benefit of improving your server management skills
no docking for me thanks /s
Well, the true economics of the subject considering the entire market are than a 1 month VPN subscription is cheaper than the cheapest subscription of a single one of these services.
It would be interesting to see the graph of VPN # of active subscriptions next to streaming service # of active subscriptions for the last 2 years.
One service, everything on it, no ads, no “leaving soon”, 4K Blu-ray quality visuals and audio.
It doesn’t matter how much you pay right now, this service does not exist outside of piracy. I will pay up to £30 a month for this. The ball in in your court.
Arrrr, matey
I skip the subscribe part. Just watch and repeat.
