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Comment by mitthrowaway2 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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