Subscription Fatigue: Nearly Half of US Consumers Frustrated by Streaming | Hacker News Reader

Subscription Fatigue: Nearly Half of US Consumers Frustrated by Streaming

variety.com

29 pointsDeinos17 comments

The convenient thing to me is that you can just subscribe to a month or two of whatever streaming service has the show you want, and then cancel it when you're done. In this fashion you can just rotate the service you subscribe to over time, see everything you want and only maintain one subscription. Could be more challenging with families all wanting to watch different things, but maintaining two services also wouldn't be too bad.

Can you pay for some large number of subscriptions to all the streaming services then sell a wrapper service that offers all of the content and will swap logins for you depending on what you watch?

I guess the big players would shut that down really quickly.

My friends used to be jealous of my giant archive drive full of TV shows and movies. Then for a time they made fun of me, asking me why I would download things I could already watch on Netflix or Hulu. Now they're jealous again.

Different companies from CBS to YouTube want to win the streaming wars, but they're going to end up popping the streaming bubble, and I'm sure there will be alarmist articles claiming that streaming "just isn't viable". Everyone wants to be next Netflix, but they don't seem to stop and think if they should. The more that the content I like becomes desperate among various services, the more I'm going to say "f* it" and go back to torrenting.

Right? For all the hype about the iPad, iTunes (the store) was the real genius of Jobs (pre-iPhone), and it was just what people had made clear they wanted - all their music tastes in one convenient place that wasn't bundled with stuff they didnt want and was available at a decent price.

Yet despite people being clear about what they wanted, producers tried everything they could to prioritize opposite goals.

Now we're seeing the same thing happen in streaming. I'd love to see multiple platforms with the same content do they could compete over experience and platform, but instead I have to deal with Hulu's abhorrent player, with Netflix's increasing unwillingness to just be quiet, and with Amazon's insistence on putting in ads for their content when I watch something. All because they each offer unique content.

Competition is supposed to be about offering more value, not seeing how much irritation you can get away with.

Are you saying the best for visual media streaming would be how iTunes was where you paid for seasons or episodes? I’ve watched quite a bit of tv, namely from Hulu, Netflix, Prime, HBO. If I had to pay for all I’ve watched. It would have cost a fortune.

No, I was saying it should be like iTunes was for music where you could buy a song without having to buy the CD, contrary to the trends of the time. Obviously that doesn't line up as well for visual series episodes, but I was focusing on the "avoid the unwanted trends the producers are trying to use to force a higher price" aspect.

Not just streaming video. The same storm is brewing in gaming. Google, nvidia and MS are all launching game streaming platforms. Actual...think sony too

And Apple

Its astounding people still have streaming subscriptions when you can just lookup and find a free version for whatever you wanna stream.

Some people have qualms with the morality of piracy when it isn’t needed. Is it really astounding?

Movie Streaming all though partly good is like an all you can eat buffet. There is plenty of food to choose from but nothing you want to eat. Compare that to buying movies ala carte food aka buying quality movies.

Plus buying movies your movie viewing do not get data analyzed in the same way especially not if you buy physical media.

You can then build a personal media library.

My solution: There Can Be Only One. If it is not on Netflix, it does not exist. That's bad for my range of choices, but see also: the paradox of choice.

People will really be excited when all of their software goes subscription too!

I'm holding out for a subscription OS.

At least half of everything that costs money on iOS is subscription based at this point. If not more.

I’m not including games. I assume that’s diff.

I do Amazon Prime Video +1

Just canceled Netflix going to spin-up HBO for a few months.

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