Subscription Fatigue (Premium)

Like many (or most) of you, we subscribe to a lot of online services. And we’re overdue taking a hard look at what we spend and why.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, and so I was interested to see a Nielsen report that speaks very positively about the growing proliferation of streaming video services. It speaks of “a new age of media” being upon us, a “promising arena” of content, and how “the consumer is the ultimate decider.” But what it doesn’t really get into is the escalating costs of these services, and how having to subscribe to multiple services---it seems like a new one appears every few days---is driving complexity as much as it is choice.

“60 percent of Americans subscribe to more than one paid video streaming service,” the report notes. “Better still—especially for platforms entering the streaming market—is that 93 percent of U.S. consumers say they will either increase or keep their existing streaming services.”

Better still. Huh.

Of course, the first step towards finding a solution is admitting you have a problem. My own relationship with subscription services is evolving. But it’s complicated.

Let’s stick with video streaming services: I---or, “we,” really, since this involves my whole family---currently subscribe to several of these services, many of which provide different pricing/capability tiers. The complicated bit comes from the fact that I have two kids, one who is off at college in New York and one who is a high school senior that's still home with us, who also use these services. This requires me to pay for the most expensive service tiers that support multiple family members and/or simultaneous streams. We currently use:

Netflix. We pay $15.99 per month for Netflix Premium Ultra HD, which lets us watch on 4 screens at a time in UHD/4K quality, plus download videos to up to 4 devices at a time. Netflix is probably the service we used the most in 2019, though our usage varies from month-to-month if we’re watching shows on other services. Netflix is the king of original series and is the one I’d keep if I had to give up the rest.

Hulu. We pay $11.99 per month for Hulu (No Ads), and this service is used primarily by my wife and me (we watch a 30-minute show at lunch each day, most recently we’re rewatching “30 Rock,” which is brilliant) and our daughter. We watch the occasional original series on Hulu, the most notable being “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Amazon Prime Video. This service is “free” in the sense that it is a perk of Amazon Prime, which costs $119 per year (about $10 per month), and we’d pay for this service even if the video part of it wasn’t included. We only use it sporadically since its original series aren’t all that notable (“Jack Ryan” and “The Man in the High Castle” are both pretty good). There is a decent selection of movies if I’m bored.

Disney+. I paid for a year upfront, so the cost h...

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