From the Editor’s Desk: Inconvenient ⭐️

In April, Netflix, a service that forces me to constantly reaffirm that I am not just me but in my real home, emailed me. Not to apologize for this ongoing inconvenience, but rather to inform me that it was changing the pricing on my Premium subscription. And yes, that was the term it used, changing. As if maybe the price were going down.

It was not. As we reported back in March, Netflix has raised the prices of its various subscription tiers for the second time in just over a year. Netflix Premium used to cost $24.99 per month, but now it’s $26.99. So not a big price hike, but this ignores how Netflix is more aggressively going after multi-person households so it can charge an additional $7.99 (with ads) or $9.99 per additional member, something I’m supposed to do because my two kids live elsewhere. I don’t do that, but if I did, I’d be on the hook for about $45 per month so we can all watch Netflix.

I am not doing that. Ever.

It’s a classic tale. Subscription services like Netflix are great deals until they are not thanks to regular price hikes, an expanded set of competitors that’s grown so vast no one can keep them all straight, and the resulting diffusion of high quality content. I do feel that Netflix is still the “best” of this type of service, meaning it has the biggest and broadest collection of content. But there are terrific shows and other content that I want to see that are spread across all those other services, too. Like “butter scraped across too much bread,” as Bilbo Baggins so vividly describes in The Lord of the Rings.

We don’t have a live TV solution of any kind, which probably saves us almost $100 a month but also incurs the occasional problem, like on New Year’s Eve when all the people in our home want to watch the event live on TV. We watch live sporting events here in Mexico–like the last few Super Bowls, World Series, and NBA Finals–at a local bar we frequent, and that’s worked out well. And thank God for that because my growing concerns about the proliferation and costs of subscription services would be dramatically more problematic if I had to pay for live TV.

It’s not just Netflix and all the other video-on-demand services. It’s Spotify and all the music streaming services. It’s OneDrive and all the cloud storage services. It’s my Audible Premium Plus membership. Amazon Prime. Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Apple One, Microsoft 365 Family, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and Google One/Google AI Pro. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. And probably more I am forgetting right now because, let’s be clear about this, that’s a big part of the business plan for subscription services. The best customers are the ones who pay for a service they never use. And I am an excellent customer.

Complaining about subscription services is pointless and obvious. We all get it. We all know what we could do about this problem, and most of us do nothing at all. We can cart out the term “enshittification” and we can all nod our heads along because we all see it everywhere. But if you’re anything like me, first of all, I’m so sorry, and secondly, then you might use the same coping mechanism that I use. Which is to forget the bad things. This is not an explicit strategy, it’s just the way I’m wired. And as with Netflix being a good deal until it is not, this is a great strategy until it is not. Every month, silently, money is being automatically funneled out my bank accounts and credit cards to pay for all those services.

I can’t get rid of all of them. I need to be honest about that.

But I also can’t continue like this. I have taken steps in the past to lessen the hold that Big Tech has on my life, for example, by buying two NAS devices, putting one in Mexico, and working off that storage daily instead of using OneDrive or Google Drive. Yay for me, it works. But I’m still paying for OneDrive and Google Drive via whatever other services those companies offer.

It’s time for some difficult decisions.

We fly home from Mexico a week from Friday, and we’ll be in Pennsylvania through mid-July, with the notable caveat that we will, in fact, not be in Pennsylvania for much of that time. We’re going to the Finger Lakes over the Memorial Day long weekend, we’re visiting Nashville, Tennessee for a week with the kids in mid-June, my wife is going on a European cruise with her college roommate in late June/early July, and I will no doubt visit Boston during that time myself. So there’s going to be a lot of back and forth, and though I had wanted to spend most of the summer in PA this year, my sister and her husband are finally coming to Mexico City, so we’ll come back for about a month mid-summer. It’s going to be busy, basically.

But while we are in Nashville, I will do something I’ve done before, but with a more aggressive mindset. I will find out which music, video, and other services the kids actually use and rely on, which we’re paying for, and then start making those difficult decisions, finally. Those decisions will involve culling services and lowering our monthly outlay.

I am not sure of specifics yet, though this is consuming me as I write this.

I have often discussed the possibility of subscribing to one video service, and only one video service, each month–Netflix in June, Hulu in July, or whatever–and that still seems like a good idea.

In the pandemic fog of 2020, my wife and I briefly entertained the idea of buying an RV and driving around the country to see baseball games in as many Major League parks as possible. That fell apart for all the obvious reasons, but I had observed to my wife at the time that we had thousands of ripped movies, TV shows, and other videos on a NAS and that that content could satisfy our video-watching needs for years if need be. That’s still true today, and though much of it is lower resolution than the Full HD and 4K content we now expect, it looks surprisingly good, and with all the upsizing/super-resolution tech we have today, it’s probably only going to get better. That content will help when it comes to culling services, I think.

I once defined a hipster as one who is nostalgic for a past they never experienced, and I throw the mini-resurgences of legacy or analog technologies like vinyl records, audio CDs, and the iPod into this category. Physical media is of no interest to me, and while I’m not super-invested in “owning” vs. “renting,” there are too many advantages to digital to ignore it. For example, my entire library of books can fit on a Kindle e-reader, or it could take up dozens of shelves of bookcases that would cover every wall in this house.

Put simply, I’m not going to give up everything and move into a cabin in the woods. But maybe I could make my life a bit less convenient.

Music is an interesting problem. I get YouTube Music Premium and Apple Music through whatever subscriptions I have with those companies. I pay for Spotify Family because my wife and one kid still use it (the other has moved to Apple Music, interestingly). I like the convenience of being able to add any music at all to the playlists I make, and I use Shazam (or, on Pixel, the similar on-device capabilities) to identify songs I hear out in the world so I can add something new to those playlists. This is all semi-automatic. But maybe it doesn’t have to be.

I have a good-sized MP3 collection in the NAS. Like the videos, this was all ripped from physical media I still store somewhere in the attic in case the DMCA police ever come calling. But I probably haven’t purchased music in years, I honestly can’t recall. My playlists are entirely comprised of music in the cloud, across whatever services. When I find new music with Shazam or whatever, I just add it. I don’t pay for it. But of course, I do pay for it. I pay a lot for it in never-ending monthly payments to multiple services. Like the difficult decision bit, this is a difficult reality to face and necessary. If I just paid for the music I listened to, would I pay more or less than I pay right now for subscription services? What does this look like if I go from three services to two or just one?

Here’s the inconvenience. Let’s say I’ve stopped paying for all or most of these services and I’m using a single whatever app/service for music. I’m out in the world and I hear a good song and would like to add it to a playlist or my collection. So I Shazam it and find out what it is. To add this song to my collection, I would have to buy it and perhaps download it somewhere, to the NAS most likely. This is obviously less convenient than how I do this now. But is it … better? From a value/cost perspective, does this make sense? I think it might.

I don’t know if this turns into a monthly focus, an article series, or whatever else. But this is perhaps worth discussing further and with more specific examples. It feels like something that could go on for quite a while. I mentioned this to my wife and she immediately went to gym memberships, a non-digital subscription.

I feel like this needs a name, too. I think of this as an appropriate amount of inconvenience maybe, but the hip young kids would probably call it “friction-maxxing” or whatever nonsense. That’s not it, this isn’t about friction for friction’s sake. Instead, I am looking for some kind of balance here. The right combination of convenience and value, or perhaps inconvenience and cost. And there’s a broader theme around simplifying and eliminating complexity and stress. It’s big.

And the first step is always the hardest. Just taking on this task, across so many different categories of services, is daunting. Daunting enough that you don’t even want to start. Which, come to think of it, is another failed coping strategy.

But I have to start. And so I will.