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 here is $69.99 for the year, so about $5.83 per month, but the normal monthly cost is $6.99. This service appeals mostly to families with kids, but I’m interested because of Star Wars, most specifically “The Mandalorian” and whatever series come next. But I’ve been rewatching the Star Wars movies in 4K, which is fun. And I will catch up on all the Marvel superhero movies over time.

YouTube. Because I pay for Google Play Music ($9.99 per month), I get what is essentially YouTube Premium (which is normally $11.99 per month), which provides an ad-free viewing experience and background video viewing (on devices, where you can do other things and the video will keep playing, often in a small PIP window). This is something I watch almost daily in short bursts, and I assume that it’s contributing to my inability to concentrate on longer-form content.

Apple TV+. I got this one for free because I bought an iPhone last year, but Apple TV+ costs $4.99 per month normally. It’s a bit light on content, but the two original shows we did watch so far—“Servant” and “For All Mankind” were excellent.

MLB.TV. My wife and I are big baseball fans, and when we moved to Pennsylvania in 2017, she asked me to figure out a way to watch the Red Sox. That way is MLB.TV, which costs $93.99 per season for a single team, which we did for two years, or $121.99 for every team, which is what we’ve switched to. So it’s about $17.42 per month from April to October (the season) or about $10 per month if you go by the 12 month year. This service is incredibly problematic—you can only watch “out-of-market games” and it has its own commercials, not the local ones, each game broadcast ends the second that play stops, so you can’t watch the post-game stuff—but it’s all we got.

Another complexity, though it’s a good strategy for saving money, is that we will move in and out of some services over time in order to binge-watch certain content. For example, last year we subscribed to HBO Go ($14.99 per month) for a few months so we could watch the final season of “Game of Thrones,” and we used that time to also binge-watch other shows, like “Veep.” We temporarily subscribed to Showtime Now ($11 per month)as well, to binge-watch the previous season of “Homeland,” and will do so again later this year when the final season wraps up. And we subscribed to YouTube TV ($49.99) temporarily to watch football. (We don’t watch traditional TV normally.)

And then I also purchase some video content, too. This is mostly movies when they’re on sale (at $4.99 to $9.99, I’ll buy a movie I know I’ll watch repeatedly), but also the occasional TV series since we don’t watch traditional TV. For example, I purchased the first two seasons of the new “Magnum PI,” which is OK. I was a huge Magnum fan back in the day. We occasionally rent movies too, of course.

Anyway. Add that all up and … it’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of money to pay for just sitting on your ass and staring at a screen. My wife and I have often talked about stripping this down dramatically and being aggressive about which small set of services we pay for each month. But with the kids both using multiple services too, it’s hard to make that move now. I’m not exactly looking forward to them being gone per se, but I will admit that I am sort of looking forward to them not being dependent on us for this kind of thing.

Video services are, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. We also pay for multiple music services (Spotify Family, because my kids prefer it, plus Google Play Music, because I prefer that), multiple cell lines (Verizon Wireless for everyone but me, including my wife’s parents, plus Google Fi for me), and various content services like newspapers (The New York Times, The Washington Post), Medium (for both me and my wife), and probably more. (As a content maker, I feel very strongly that it’s important to support high-quality content makers.) We buy ebooks from Amazon. We pay for Office 365 Home ($99.99 per year), which gives everyone in the family 1 TB of OneDrive storage. Xbox Live Gold for both me and my son (and more recently, Xbox Game Pass). And probably more.

We are the perfect consumers when you think about it. It’s … kind of gross.

More to the point, it’s expensive. Very expensive. And when you look at the changes you can make to save money, these are the types of things that should go first. Almost all of this is discretionary.

And yet. We can’t just eliminate most of it immediately for various reasons. And so one of the things I’ll be wrestling with this year, and discussing with my wife, is what matters most with regards to these services and where can we make meaningful change. I suspect it will be a slow but painful process, and a moving target. And that we’ll never fully separate ourselves from the monthly outlay. But surely some change is possible.