The Flaws of “Subscription Fatigue”, “SVOD Fatigue”, and the “Streaming Wars” | Hacker News Reader

The Flaws of “Subscription Fatigue”, “SVOD Fatigue”, and the “Streaming Wars”

matthewball.vc

25 pointsbschne20 comments

Maybe I'm not suited for the modern world, but I paid for Office and Adobe Creative Suite and BBEdit and I expect to be able to use them indefinitely, unless I want a feature upgrade. I don't want a toothbrush subscription or a laundry soap subscription and I don't want a Photoshop subscription.

I worry about what happens to the things I've created should my subscription lapse. I'd rather budget for a one-time purchase than have a yoke around my neck forever. A tiny yoke, sure, but add that to all the other ones and they are taxing to carry around.

The onus of updating software for new platforms and against security problems creates new costs for software vendors. With the increased operational costs of developing software there needs to be new revenue streams. I for one am not opposed to paying small monthly fees for software that I use regularly.

The easiest way around this is to offer 1 year support or 1 major version support with the initial purchase. Then for people or corporations that want to have continuous support then they could pay for it.

This is especially true on iOS, where the vendor likes changing the APIs and rules at short notice.

Toothbrushes should have tiny removable heads, containing essentially only the bristles, which slide in and you replace when you need a new one. Definitely for the Sonicare type. Maybe even for all toothbrushes. This approach would reduce their cost even further and reduce more waste in landfills, but I guess they want to make money and I'd expect the bristles only to be priced at like $1. The rest is just plastic but when it's a "toothbrush" they can charge $10 for it but I want the cartridge for 10 dollars for 10 refills, or cheaper.

I mean, some people might like subscribing for soap and stuff, maybe they actually track how often they need to replace it. I bought some of those razors from a subscription service and they send shampoo and I realized I probably don't run out of a bottle more than once per year. I think the large bottles have lasted me as long as 5 years.

“how many different roles are there to be played in video”

Which to me is the core of subscription fatigue in video streaming. I subscribe to three different services because none of them provide the single role I'm interested in. Consumers want a single service providing all the content they are interested in, and the industry as a whole is actively hostile to that desire. So I'm a customer to several services, each providing part of the role I'm interested in, waiting for a competitor to come along and provide the service I want. But the situation won't change, so I just juggle my services switching them off and on as shows come and go. Won't change unless consumer friendly legislation is passed restricting exclusive distribution rights for digital content.

> consumer friendly legislation is passed restricting exclusive distribution rights for digital content.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but how are content producers supposed to negotiate a fair price for their content, if they aren't allowed to withhold it from services paying too little?

That is misunderstanding, yes. What people are arguing for might be something like the old Net Book Agreement: if you sell it to middleman X for price $A, you also have to sell it to middleman Y for price $A, and aren't allowed to gratuitously turn down intermediaries.

Exactly. What producers lose is the ability to create a monopoly. Maybe producers will make less money, since some distributors will pay a huge premium to enable them to price gouge consumers or force consumers to switch to their services. Or maybe producers will make more money, as all distributers will need to purchase content at the price the producer sets if one of them purchases, or they risk losing customers to their competitors. But the consumers win.

I don't think actual human beings want the purchase of a toothbrush to turn into a potentially life-long decision.

It's not the money itself, it's the oppressive feeling of having standing obligations to 40 or 50 companies.

Customers hate subscriptions; the reason the model is gaining traction is because the balance of power between big business and consumer has tilted in favor of the former.

> The rise of fully flexible monthly commitments also means that consumers no longer have to worry about having made a bad decision and being stuck with it. In this sense, every subscription is still á la carte, but unlike in the analog era, the default outcome of “doing nothing” is to keep getting value you enjoy rather than running out of a thing you need.

This is upside down. If you run out of something you can usually just go out and buy it, but with a subscription if you don't need it you've spent the money and you may have to go to great lengths to cancel.

To me it seems there's an unfilled (and probably unfillable) niche: home inventory management. Your smartphone should know how much of these consumables you have and tell you when you're running low. But the reason I don't expect to see this is that it's only viable if it's on your side. The moment you leak that information to marketers it's working against you.

> Quibi is a good example here. The company believes that there is an outstanding need for a new type of content, focused on a different time and place, under a different viewing behavior and focused on a specific audience. If it is right

Well, this turned out not to have been right.

> In fact, most of us have caustic responses to per unit pricing, often to the point of irrationality (e.g. $40 for 35 loads of laundry detergent v. $1.00 per load). Amazon Prime is based on the need to get shipping fees out of the way once, versus fight them over and over and over and over, even if the effective shipping cost

Huh? I consider both of these to be examples of volume discounts: in exchange for committing up front to a higher number of washer loads or shipments, I get a better per-unit price.

One of the biggest things that bugs be with subscriptions is they often don't provide this value, and in fact cost more than I'd normally spend.

Take toothbrushes: the first service I found has a $40/yr plan. For my wife and I, I usually pick up a pack of heads for electric toothbrushes at Costco when I see them on sale and can't remember the last time I bought some - this generally works out to about every 1 to 1.5 years, costing around $10/year each. Does the cognitive burden of bit having to remember justify and extra $60/yr? For me, no.

> $40 for 35 loads of laundry detergent v. $1.00 per load

Check the numbers: this is an example of a volume anti-discount, where buying the larger size costs more per unit.

I'm not sure it's really a "caustic response to per unit pricing" or actually just yet another form of deceiving the customer who doesn't check that the larger pack isn't a worse deal.

The issue with subscriptions is the cognitive load of trying to remember them all. I'd be much more willing to have lots of subscriptions if I could see a neat table on my bank's webpage, with company, service, yearly cost and billing interval.

Whenever I get a subscription I end up with drawers full of spare tooth brushes, shaving knifes, etc. It is best to buy it when you need it, as you never know what is going to happen (e.g. COVID)

> However, it makes little sense to say that the decision to buy TV subscriptions, radio subscriptions, toothbrush subscriptions, video gaming subscriptions, dog food subscriptions, car subscriptions, or productivity software subscriptions should drive “subscription fatigue” or mean each subscription competes with one another. For decades, consumers have bought TV, music, toothbrushes, video games, dog food, cars and Microsoft Office. What’s new is that they all have similar models – digitally-based, predominantly D2C subscriptions. This changes nothing about the individual value or baseline need for them.

This makes absolutely no sense to me. The point is that many of those were one-time purchases - or lasted long enough that they could be considered one-time purchases for practical purposes (yes, this includes software, no matter how much the business side of software developement hates to hear that).

One-time purchases compete with each other for the budget I have available for those purchases - which may include money I have saved, loaned or have momentarily available for other reasons. So you could say, they compete with each other for my wealth.

In contrast, I need to pay a subscription every month, so they compete with each other for a part of my monthly income - which in a typical middle class scenario is something I can allocate with far less flexibility than my savings.

> To this end, it’s important to highlight subscriptions are often a preferred buying path for consumers. Most would rather (or can only afford) $10 a month for a multi-year license to Microsoft Office for $300. Subscriptions also meaningfully reduce the cognitive burden of repeat decision making. No longer do you need to “track” your toothbrush for wear, risk “running out” of toilet paper and then be forced to overpay for a small-volume purchase, or need to scan and hoard coupons to ensure a great deal.

Yeah, I'll just have the cognitive burden of keeping track of half a dozen different subscriptions. Thank you.

This comment reminded me to cancel my toothbrush subscription. It made me remove the toothbrush, toothpaste, and battery separately, then click a "cancel subscription" button which led to 2-3 "are you sure" pages.

I won't be subscribing to a toothbrush again.

At least you didn't have to call them and wait on hold, like many services were until recently (maybe still are).

When I realized I paid for SiriusXM on a car that I had totaled 18 months prior, boy, that was a hell of a phone call. In their defense, they did refund me the price I paid (maybe completely - can't remember) since the device went in-active, and they could see that it was not used since date mm/yy , September 2013, for example.

This sounds like satire, but isn't :(

I completely agree with this. The knowledge that subscriptions are a constant drain on your income (no matter how small) means I am extremely reluctant to pay. I think the same goes for a lot of people. I think this article don't get when people want to pay for subscriptions.

People prefer a subscription when it offers a blend of value and convenience (Costco's savings, Amazon Prime's faster shipping for cheap, and video game bundle subscriptions instead of buying outright) or offers something that's hard to replicate without a subscription (paying for phone insurance so that you're never out more than the $50 deductible if you break your phone). Toothbrush subscriptions don't fulfill either of those categories: you're probably going to the store anyway so you can get a toothbrush there, the savings are small, and a subscription doesn't simplify your life.

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