Asklemmy

43940 readers

418 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

489

Are you cancelling streaming services? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

302 comments fedilink hide all child comments

With the simultaneous rollout of restrictions on account sharing and price increases/addition of advertising, I’m cutting back severely on streaming services.

I allowed my streaming subscriptions to grow without thinking about it. Without trying to remember the constant merging and bundling, I was subscribed to probably a dozen services at one point. They ranged from Netflix and HBO and Hulu to Shudder and Showtime. I had Paramount, Criterion, Disney, Peacock, and others. I’d do the typical thing where I’d search for a movie, find it is exclusive to a platform, and grab the free trial and forget to cancel. I excused it if I found a movie even every couple of months on it. There were still nights where it’d take an hour to find something I wanted to watch. I was probably closing in on $200/month all told, and I don’t have sports subscriptions.

I’m interested in learning what other people are doing regarding the price hikes and service compromises. Are you cancelling? Are you taking advantage of bundles with your internet services? Are you rotating on some interval? Or are you not changing at all?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] MrVilliam@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

I'd been going halfsies with my best friend for years on Netflix. Now, instead of going halfsies, we both go nonesies and Netflix eats crow.

My wife and I currently use HBO, Disney, and prime, but prime is just a bonus we don't care about that comes with the free shipping, and her parents pay for Disney and we have one profile for us. I care most about HBO, but significantly less now than when The Last of Us was fresh. I'm trying some of the big shows and they're pretty good, but if money were tight I wouldn't hesitate to cut it. Millennials and Gen Z just don't worship TV like older generations do. I personally love movies, but I'll use my library card or sail the seas before I bend knee to ridiculous price hikes.

On the off chance that some streaming executive is in here trying to see where the line is, it's already been crossed for many. Your shit needs to be cheap, intuitive, and reliable, all while offering a library that people give a shit about. People are paying for convenience. Pirating isn't convenient. Going to the library isn't convenient. Buying what we wanna see and risking owning something we don't like isn't convenient. And your shit no longer being cheap, no longer being intuitive, or no longer being reliable ceases to feel convenient. And your library that you offer is the lions share of what matters to most people because your competitors probably have a platform that's largely intuitive and reliable. You need to beat them on price or on content, and you'll be the next Steve Jobs if you can consistently beat them on both. But you need to do that before pirating becomes good enough at reliability and with an intuitive UI and makes it so easy to get good content that your bubble fucking bursts. Tick tock, motherfuckers.