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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

The solution I've been experimenting with is streaming rotation; rather than subscribing to a dozen streaming services and watching a few hours of each each month, this couple of months will be Hulu, this couple of months will be Sling (sports, mostly, though lately they seem to be getting locked out of more and more stuff too), this month will be this other service, and so on.

If the content is going to stay available, why have subscriptions to all of them all the time?

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I know of people who do this for Sky Sports UK (traditional premium tv), who hold the exclusive rights to many English Premier league games (soccer). When the off season approaches, call up Sky and ask to terminate your subscription. Either they offer you a really nice deal, similar to what new subscribers get, or you quit for a few months and re-subscribe just before the season starts again. There's more on Sky than just soccer, but obviously that's the main draw for most people.

With Freesat in the mix in the UK, the only other things Sky has going for it are:

a) Sky Atlantic showing new HBO shows 1 day after HBO (no HBO in UK)

b) a slightly more polished EPG and recorder than the freesat/linux equivalents though that gap seems to be reducing.

Yeah I've seen projects like OpenVix running on nice hardware, e.g. VU+ tv boxes where there's a nice UI that is a clone of the standard Sky menu.

I'm doing the same. I cancel the same day I subscribe so I can watch for the month without a perpetual bill.

This is my solution as well, and I think it works great. I subscribe to a single month of a streaming service after the show I want to watch has completed, binge watch it, cancel, rinse and repeat with another service. At least they get some revenue out of it -- if they ever tried to require contracts, I'd just ditch them entirely.

that's a really cool idea. I just killed my netflix subscription last month because I felt there wasn't enough good content for my taste and that I've already seen it all ...

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