Americans' new TV habit: Subscribe, watch, cancel, repeat | Hacker News Reader

Americans' new TV habit: Subscribe, watch, cancel, repeat

nytimes.com

This is exactly what I have been doing since the pandemic. I have two issues that cause me to do this. First there is Netflix with no way to evaluate all their content inside their user interface. You need to browse on another device at NYT, Tomatoes, and other reviews before deciding what to watch. Netflix of the past had APIs that let 3rd parties access the titles which gave Fanatics the opportunity to comment, review, blog, etc… Netflix killed that, and they have failed to create an internal community area where fans can discuss content. So the best is to only watch the 10% of content which they promote, cancel the service, and then come back in 3-6 months.

Second reason I do this is streaming services like Apple, simply do not have enough content to continue paying every month.

I suspect that Netflix actively doesn't want transparency on what's available and you'll like. Over a decade ago I used their API to build a CLI tool that just listed the top 100 movies they have sorted by their prediction on how much I'd like it. It was so useful and their predictions were really good. All gone. Instead the GUI shows you different images for the same show and no real way to sort by anything on your own anymore.

The mismanagement at Dish and DirecTV is staggering. The pendulum has now swung so far in the fragmentation direction that there is real value in bundling disparate content in a restricted fashion, and charging people for it - like cable/satellite bundles. Except now, the business models available are much more diverse because the telemetry of streaming is so much better. Where did the masters of media bundling go?

As a consumer, I really dislike that the media industry has made it my problem to figure out who owns the rights to something. Just take my money and let me see the content. Having to google “<movie> streaming” to see a list of options in different streaming providers who have varying levels of service at different tiers of their paid subscriptions is inane.

Whoever figures out the bundling problem will own a lot of eyeballs, and probably be able to monetize on ads too.

I think it's more likely we'll each have a GenAI that will basically reproduce a close approximation of the things you like (including old reruns) for your one personal entertainment "bundle" than to see a real bundle platform like this emerge.

Hey <your assistant>, watch Seinfeld <generates indistinguishable Seinfeld>

the issue here is that the content producers have long followed a model where they want to make things as complicated as possible. many distribution channels with different pricing models and different time and geographic windows. they want to squeeze every last drop out of their portfolio. they also want the agency to renegotiate distribution at the drop of a hat, and to do as many experiments with bundling and marketing as they can.

so unless you own the whole thing soup to nuts ala Netflix (which is apparently really running out of resources to produce decent content), idk what a distributor is going to able to do here

This weird comparison with the behavior of old-school cable TV customers had me scratching my head. For sure, people stuck with the same cable TV provider: they had no choice. Most markets had only the one provider.

"The data suggests a sharp shift in consumer behavior — far from the cable era, when viewers largely stuck with a single provider..."

Cable subscribers wouldn’t swap their bundles based on which shows were on.

Bundles didn’t really have today’s level of differential.

As an example, NBC and ABC are pretty commonly both in default bundles, but now you get to pick between Peacock and Hulu.

Provider in the cable TV case would be channels/bundles like HBO or Showtime not cable companies like Comcast.

I just torrent. Why pay for new shows when there are literally hundreds of great shows and movies from years ago that I never got around to watching?

There is a massive over supply of content. Much more to do with Corporations dumping cash into the content economy to fight with each other over finite Attention, than it has anything to do with content, the creative class or the quality of content generated.

People have not really theorized what happens when Total Available Attention doesn't grow at the rate content does. When supply over runs demand price should drop to zero. Chaos and randomness shall prevail until we have better Attention Allocation theories.

They got what they deserved for fragmenting the entire market, and then increasing prices to oblivion. I don't have any paid streaming service anymore, no thank you. Actually insane to think that free streaming services provide a better service than paid streaming services nowadays. I say free since the legality depends on the jurisdiction, but anti-piracy groups sure would like you to believe otherwise.

Some already punish you by deleting your account history after 9 months.

I'm surprised we haven't seen activation and cancelation fees start to get added.

But this was the whole value add of streaming over cable - the ability to stop paying for channels you don't want to watch - so... duh?

I think all the streaming providers know adding fees like that is going to lock customers into streaming services, and not necessarily their streaming services. People would be way less likely to subscribe to watch one show if they had to pay fees for either activating or cancelling the subscription.

They'd go back to piracy, as simple as that.

People won't go back to piracy. Most of the people that subscribe to Netflix weren't really pirates. Maybe they had a friend that would burn them a DVD on request, or got the number of some guy who sold bootleg DVDs. They'd probably use these services for a couple of movies a year. Most peoples direct experience with piracy was downloading Metallica songs on limewire when they were 16. It's been a long time since then. There's a whole generation of adults who largely only know TV as it exists today, that is, streaming services.

The ones that were pirates, I never understood why they left. I have yet to pay for a single streaming service in my entire life, or cable, or any of that. This was always going to happen, I saw it coming for years before Netflix even had a viable competitor. And on top of that, the diminishing quality of the content, I've reached a point now that I don't pirate because I don't watch any of it. To be fair to them, my TV watching was always very minimal, I'm an easy guy to alienate. Still, I can't imagine people who know how to pirate actually paying for what passes for entertainment these days.

Also commercials.

How anybody puts up with that is beyond me.

Sometimes I go to YouTube or watch tv at a friend's house. Suddenly a smiling salesman is wagging his junk in my face. You people just accept this?

I don't get it either, when I experience what you talk about I just laugh and sometimes ask my friends how they feel about it. Remember, it's normal to them. It's also amusing to see how TV advertising has evolved (or devolved to be more accurate) since the last time I saw a commercial.

Because Netflix was more convenient than piracy in the golden era of streaming, especially for non-English speaking folks. I think people tend to forget that piracy isn't that much about media preservation at all. It's in fact extremely common for sites to nuke anything non-English as soon as possible.

* Contains non-English dubs? Oi mate, quite the “redundant audio tracks” you've got there, please remove those.

* Only non-English dub? Bloody hell mate, can't have that. Someone please upload a proper release.

* English dub? Go right ahead mate, can't live without that.

So, unless other native language speakers band together to archive and share media in their own little community, they're shit out of luck. Now, of course, also forget about nice pre-made media automation setups since they'll break down as soon as you leave the language of English.

Lol. They create algorithms that are quick to identify what new users are interested in, and then hamper the same algorithms by deleting watch histories.

I'm okay with having a fresh start. I don't want the algorithms knowing a lot about me anyway.

Not showing you your watch history has exactly zero to do with deleting your watch history. Data like that is never deleted, it might be valuable later.

This isn't what Americans want to do, it's what the streaming subscription pricing model asks them to do.

It’s also what having lots of subscriptions with no other opportunity for purchase does.

I think the peek of this mess is when they put the Pam and Tommy episodes based on the sex tape on Disney+.

Seriously WTF Disney?

Can you please clarify what your problem with that is? I really enjoyed that show, and as long as it's clearly age-rated and doesn't appear on my kid's profile, I couldn't care less if it's under the Disney+ offering.

Actually, this is what Americans *want* to do. The whole move to streaming was supposed to solve one problem: I only want to pay for what I watch.

Cable used to bundle 200 channels together for $100+ when you maybe had 2-3 shows you regularly watched. When a new show came up on a channel you didn’t have, you had to purchase a “bundle” of 20 extra channels you’re not going to watch. And some of these things had 12 month contracts. When Netflix came along, they added a bunch of shows and movies in one place for a fixed monthly price, which you could cancel any time. But then individual TV channels instead of partnering with Netflix, decided they needed their own streaming service, effectively again asking consumers to subscribe to multiple services even if those services have only one or two good shows to offer. Consumers don’t want to pay for what they don’t watch, so a solution is to subscribe, watch the one show you want and then cancel.

It’s really that people care more about the specific content, and not at all where it’s hosted. There’s no “loyalty” to one provider or another as much as they hope there could be.

Seems like a problem that could be solved through offering discounted prices to long-term subscribers, as an acknowledgement that they're probably not always using it very actively.

the “onlyfans model” - if you want people to stay subscribed, then offer them discounts to do so ;) if you incentivize signups you are probably disincentivizing long-term retention just implicitly.

> I only want to pay for what I watch.

I’ve questioned leaving subscription based streaming services and instead renting the stuff I actually want to watch from Apple, or somewhere similar.

Between cable and streaming there was a brief transition period where you could buy most series individually. I really loved that. OTOH those shows were $20-30. I know wait till the show is almost over and then subscribe for a month which is usually even cheaper. The purchase model felt less bullshit though. My only gripe was and still is that the whole season was cheaper than individual episodes and the purchase price of the first 1-2 episodes didn't go against the price of the whole season if you first wanted to try it.

Yeah, "subscribe, watch, cancel" is effectively "rent" in a world without video rentals.

There may be more than want involved. Inflation has not substantially slowed, and if you've got to choose between peacock and eating, well. It seems the corpos have recently, more and more, been complaining about people not "wanting" to pay for their stuff, this probably won't be the last, but they shouldn't be surprised that you can't just indefinitely take without giving something back.

As for me and my house, a Plex server and dollar blurays from Savers let us enjoy actual quality content from before everything was some side's propaganda.

Yep. Entirely anecdotally, when Apple TV was eight dollars a month I just left it subscribed and when they raised it, I canceled not watching.

I’m not sure thee services’ pricing takes this into effect yet.

I love how this entire submarine garbage article is written from the perspective that customers are somehhow cheating by doing this and it’s their consumerly duty to pay for junk they don’t want.

This is when a market turns, when old executives with old mindsets are shocked, then appalled that a consumer has choice.

It's not necessarily an old mindset.

Newer mindsets in tech and media business are also flush with vapid baggery.

And they ("old executives with old mindsets") brought it on themselves by fracturing the market into 50+ different streaming services, and then playing "round-robin" games with shows (a given show bounces around among each service for a short time before it moves on to the next).

If they ("old executives with old mindsets") want the warm cozy feeling of the old cable bundle (customers paid for the monthly subscription regularly each month), they need to provide one single streaming service that people can sign up for, that streams /everything/ for a reasonable monthly fee (and cable bundle pricing levels is not "reasonable").

They always forget that their true competitor is the piracy scene, and the only benefit they can offer to overcome "free of charge" is an "easy and convenient one to find what a subscriber wants, when they want it". And 50+ different streaming services with shows always shuffling around from one to the next is very far from "easy and convenient".

What approach do you think they should take? License content to Apple TV or some other platform?

Sports has become very annoying to follow because the leagues themselves have segmented their own games across so many networks, which are on different streaming platforms.

The US politician who comes up with a single-payer scheme for a government-run streaming platform that consolidates feeds from content providers will get my vote. It's about time the US had its own ITV. It's getting a little ridiculous how costly all of this has become.

And it would be apt to get single-payer streaming before single-payer healthcare, because that's about how backwards things are in this country.

Good for US consumers, wielding negative feedback.

In this case, towards companies that have scattered the product people actually want sparsely among numerous outlets.

Each of which acts like they have a captive audience, to which they can do whatever they want (e.g., anti-usability dark patterns, advertising-centric thinking, not thinking of the content as the sole product).

We don't vote with our pocketbooks as much as we should. This is a start.

Definitely not new. We only know a handful of people (without kids) who keep more than 2 subscription services open at a time. If anything, the frequency of switching has increased. No one place has a large enough catalog to sustain the demand / consumption and short attention spans of the current consumer market.

I exclude Apple TV+ from our list since it's coupled with Music, Arcade, News and other things that we use as a family. I also use iCloud for my @personadomain email.

We generally avoid Amazon. I'll burn through Fallout during a $1.99 Prime trial or something, get a few packages shipped for "free" and move on.

We used to have AT&T fiber, that came bundled with HBO which was nice. We really didn't use it much though. Anything I want to see is 10 episodes and I can binge it when I'm sick.

Amex cards sometimes have a media sub program. We did Disney, Hulu and the NYT for $5 after the monthly credit on the statement. It easier to justify keeping those around when we change things up.

I wonder if live events are going to become more important to these services. Eg the NFL playoffs or the Olympics. It forces someone to have the service at a particular point in time. If a service can get good coverage of live events throughout the year, it might push people to stay subscribed.

They already are. Peacock had a wildcard nfl playoff game exclusively, one that would attract the swifties, and it broke records for number of subs and views. More impressive is that the stream was beautiful and the tech worked great.

As a F1 fan I can say that F1TV is one of the very few subscriptions I keep.

That seems like common sense, no? Why would you pay for something that you don't use?

Not streaming related but I do the same thing with Amazon Prime.

Amazon already offers free shipping over $35 and those items almost always arrive within 2 days for me without Prime.

Then every few months, during checkout, Amazon offers me "free trial for 1 month Prime". I subscribe, place my order, wait for it to ship and either instantly cancel the Prime so it doesn't renew or cancel it couple days before it's about to be renewed. After this, for a few months, amazon offers "try Prime for 99 cents first month" and then few months later, they start offering "free trial for 1 month Prime" once again.

I’m going to be honest, to me this sounds like a huge hassle that isn’t worth $15/month.

I can understand not paying for streaming you aren’t actually watching but this is in a whole other level

Choosing not to pay money for what they call "free" shipping you don't need is different than choosing not to pay money for TV you're not watching?

Just pirate things, my droogs. Tell your droogs to pirate things too. And don't just pirate entertainment. Pirate textbooks, research materials, and educational/enrichment materials too!

Long live the pirate bay

Long live audiobook Bay

Long live library Genesis

Long live sci hub

Copyright isn’t real, and gatekeeping pop culture in this fashion is ahistorical and revisionist, it’s literally not a thing that existed like this until the 19th or even 20th century.

You can always pirate media/movies, above all else. Absolutely a case of it being always morally justified, unironically. Letting corpos take our popular social culture away with 150+ year exclusivity periods was never the intention.

Disney could not have been started today, the modern copyright law is corpos pulling up the ladder after stealing from the public domain themselves, openly and blatantly. They picked the public domain into their pocket and charge us to rent it back.

What I'm getting sick of is why the hell every other service out there now has the need to bundle goddamn TV streaming services like no tomorrow.

No, my cellphone service should not need to come with streaming TV so that the price can be quietly hiked on the backend. No, I want Amazon Prime without all the bullshit streaming because I don't consume any of it. It's like Youtube and Netflix trying to get into gaming to try to keep throwing more kitchen sinks at all of us when we don't want it.

I'd add that Amazon Prime (provided you don't recoil from anything "Amazon") usually offers the full season of most shows, albeit after the subscribers of that streaming service have seen it.

So if you can wait, you can still buy most of what's good.

I think the remaining people on those services are in the "captive cash cow" herd: they'll keep paying no matter how bad it gets.

Cash cow how? I have Amazon prime and I’m not paying for it. My personal assistant is. /s

/edit /moo /yarr

Wonder how long until only yearly subscriptions are allowed. If banning account sharing increased profits I'm sure that would too.

The highest tier of Nintendo Switch Online (which gives access to N64, GBA, and Genesis games) is for a year only.

Right before pirating makes an uptick.

For me, this pattern is just common sense. I’ve had no more than one subscription active at a time for over two years. I keep a list of things that sound interesting, and when it gets to be more than a couple for a single provider, I’ll re-up. Why keep paying for content you don’t care about?

Of course, if you have kids, I can understand keeping the subscription meter running.

Hollywood has this dictum that you are only as good as your last movie. The streaming services have been jacking up their prices and reducing new shows, Disney+ is down to one decent show per quarter if that. It makes sense to subscribe only every third month. Their back catalog is not as valuable as they think.

Just yesterday my friend told me about this. His family is planning to resubscribe to "Disney+" so they can watch "The Acolyte". Then unsubscribe afterwards. And that's how they do it.

I of course have never subscribed to a streaming service. Yo ho.

Let’s maybe find a way to aggregate them and give discount on the monthly bill, eh? :)

I am not American, but I am American in the Southern Hemisphere and I do that.

American too as in The Americas specifically Canada and yeah I do it too.

I'm of an age when a TV series was 25 episodes and then a new season of 25 shows the next year. This trend of make eight shows than see you in 18 months is what is to blame.

During the cable era, we stuck with one vendor because the sons-a-bitches lobbied to limit competition. We're still suffering the aftereffects of that today.

Seems fine to me. When people have activation energy to repeat that they should do it.

Sounds like a startup opportunity: collects the movies I want to watch across all providers, and then round robbin my subscriptions based on volume to watch and my speed of watching to minimize my costs.

Streaming services went right back to linear TV's consumer unfriendly model of bundling a bunch of crap in with the relatively few titles people actually want to consume.

Worse, they went full bore on cranking out largely mediocre, but expensive, "original content" that subscribers subsidize, whether or not they actually consume it.

But, if you want to actually select what you want to watch, then you pay the equivalent of a full month's subscription to "rent" 2-3 titles.

Plus fragmentation.

So, after a compelling, value-oriented start (think early Netflix), the streaming ecosystem has become the antithesis of what consumers want: selection (and selectivity) and convenience at a fair price.

In other words, they've enshittified like everything else.

I just watch YouTube

Now if only I could buy just the one show I want to watch, and not pay for the entire month.

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