Vs just turning on the TV and flicking channels to see what’s on.
Which is great until the answer is "nothing worth watching", which is pretty common in my personal experience with my personal tastes (i.e. take this as a valid datapoint, but only a single datapoint).
Not just Boomers. I've seen numbers showing that Gen X is getting tired of jumping through hoops to watch TV, so they're going back to cable, or going * gasp * OTA.
The numbers also show that Gen Z seems to embrace "owned" physical media a lot more than Millennials, and that they're also more likely to go full OTA just because they see little value in paying for multiple streams or a cable subscription.
It seems that Millennials love streams and subscriptions, and everyone else is rethinking whether that's a good idea.
I'm also not sure it's useful to distinguish a cable bundle from streaming if that streaming includes YouTube TV or whatever. You're really just getting the bundle in a different form at that point--and not really saving a lot of money.
Expect one you can cancel and purchase within seconds whenever you want or need to, and can watch on any device you want, and deal with fewer ad breaks.
Cable TV is on no way a comparable product to the streaming services. People complaining about the horror of clicking a few buttons to cancel and resubscribe on a website gave no idea of the type of horror that awaits when dealing with a cable company.
I was actually pleasantly surprised that when I canceled cable TV and my landline from Comcast they didn't even put up a mild fight. (I still have Internet from them.)
It is a very fragmented landscape. On the other hand, I find I can subscribe to a few services and get access to far more good content than I have time to watch. There's very little that I just have to see and, if there is, I can just spin up some service for a month.
https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/...
I read people saying what you did but it just doesn't match my experience; I kept a DVD subscription the whole time until fairly recently.
But I don't think any of the streaming services are great for movies. I watch what they have and then either rent from RedBox, buy a disc if it's something I think I may want to rewatch, or pay for a streaming rental.
Every movie.
Now that every corporate interest wants a streaming site of their own, bittorrent looks attractive again.
That is simply wrong. Why would they even have maintained a DVD rental service under those circumstances? All my "movie buff" friends always maintained a DVD rental subscription.
Either Gen Z has become absolutely technologically inept or these numbers are used to shape a narrative that pleases the news conglomerates.
>It seems that Millennials love streams and subscriptions, and everyone else is rethinking whether that's a good idea.
I'm a bit skeptical of a lot of generational stereotypes. I think many people are having some subscription fatigue especially with video. But I can't say that I've seen a lot of evidence that Gen Z is particularly addicted to accumulating "stuff" especially media in physical form.
e.g. https://www.rev.com/blog/how-gen-z-and-millennials-consume-v...
Amazon (and netflix, apple, etc) has way deeper pockets than the current rightsholders (Sky, which was owned by Murdoch until he sold to Comcast recently, and BT Sport, which is also completely dwafered by Big Tech).
It's difficult to see them not going big for this next time the rights are up for renegotiation. Amazon and Netflix have extremely high household penetration already, with their apps prebundled on so many TVs.
Except the games that are streaming only, and you can’t watch on cable.
It is very consumer hostile experience.
Fiction writers love to play this trick with book trilogies and book series. So I don’t start a book series unless all books are already in print.
It's obviously fine to prefer some and not others.
You can equally see TV seasons as giving the opportunity to take a break from something for a while.
I also don't like the season-after-season thing you're referring to, but I am encouraged that over the last 3 or 4 years we've seen a small increase in the number of stories being told with a defined story arc, and no sequels.
Netflix (and later amzn video and to a slightly lesser extent hulu) was the way out of that hellhole, and I don't see even boomers like me "going back".