Americans’ new TV habit: Subscribe. Watch. Cancel. Repeat.
Americans’ new TV habit: Subscribe. Watch. Cancel. Repeat.
Many more people are jumping from one streaming subscription to another, a behavior that could have big implications for the entertainment industry.
Many more people are jumping from one streaming subscription to another, a behavior that could have big implications for the entertainment industry.
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Americans are getting increasingly impulsive about hitting the cancellation button on their streaming services. More than 29 million — about a quarter of domestic paying streaming subscribers — have canceled three or more services over the last two years, according to Antenna, a subscription research firm. And the numbers are rising fast.
The data suggests a sharp shift in consumer behavior — far from the cable era, when viewers largely stuck with a single provider, as well as the early days of the so-called streaming wars, when people kept adding services without culling or jumping around.
Among these nomadic subscribers, some are taking advantage of how easy it is, with a monthly contract and simple click of a button, to hopscotch from one service to the next. Indeed, these users can be fickle — a third of them resubscribe to the canceled service within six months, according to Antenna’s research.
“In three years, this went from a very niche behavior to an absolute mainstream part of the market,” said Jonathan Carson, the chief executive of Antenna.
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So I was thinking about subbing to Netflix again to watch something, and they had already deleted my account (it’s been about a year). So I went to my email to just try and verify that I was trying to login using the correct email address.
While doing this I found a statement from 2018. The price of Premium Netflix then was $13. Now it’s $23 I think. And they cracked down on password sharing so the service isn’t even as good, really.
Every one of these services has raised prices over and over, boiling us frogs in the pot, so it’s no wonder everyone now just subs for a month or two then bounces. It’s smart. The companies here are the stupid ones, chasing the all-mighty “line-go-up” quarterly statement MBA shit when they could have had loyal customers for years and years. I think I had a Netflix account for at least a decade or more (back when it was just mailing DVDs) until they started jumping the price by a few bucks every six months. It’s just not worth it to keep services around waiting for a show or two to come back.
Tbf, Netflix - along with Blockbuster - really was one of the pioneers in offering streaming services, when nobody else would. And it is not their fault that ISPs decided to throttle them, essentially holding their entire business hostage until they ponied up more dough, and now the content providers are doing the same. Also, most of the time they tend to grandfather people into older plans, so whatever the price is they usually (tbf, not always) tend to honor for many years in the future.
I am perpetually a year or less away from cancelling my own subscription b/c of how they continually skirt the line of pushing forward to do things like adding in "advertisements", but then walking back to make them more bearable before they start losing customers like me in droves. So I am not exactly a full-on "fan" of Netflix, just trying to offer a balanced perspective.
They also did put in the work to make a SUPERB player, plus invested heavily in making apps for physical devices. It was only this year that I finally stopped being able to play Netflix on my 9-year-old TV, and even that has a heavy chance of being more the fault of the device itself (I mostly don't care b/c my Chromecast still works just fine). Plus I still can do things like e.g. go workout in a gym while watching a pre-downloaded Netflix video without needing to use any of my mobile data, all that needing virtually no setup at all, unlike e.g. piracy that would require paying for a VPN and investigation into what mobile apps are available, plus constant monitoring to see if they remain trustworthy (so many famous examples of apps that got taken over from the inside by a malicious update).
Even so I may still leave it in a year or two, regardless of whether it is their fault or not, b/c I am not sure that I am getting anywhere close to the "value" for the amount that they are charging, anymore:-(. Seeing shows come out like Stranger Things gave me some hope, but then watching that same show enshittify itself immediately for the sake of chasing after profits to the exclusion of all else quickly killed it.
Though in that case I will need to research some alternatives...
Having used Disney and Paramount apps, I'm blown away by how much better the Netflix user experience is.
I have never seen those others but damn, that... does not sound good:-|.
I've practically never had a connection issue with Netflix:-). Among the shit-ton of evil companies out there, they are themselves no shining angels but... they don't seem nearly as bad as the rest of them imho.
I mean their selection keeps getting worse, but the app is responsive and intuitive, which is more than can be said for either of those other ones.
My thoughts about Netflix are the same: I am less than happy about the content - which is beyond their control - but very happy with the apps that they offer that is totally within their control.
I think Blockbuster became a legend of failed business strategies because it didn't offer streaming when no one else would. They waited until Netflix grabbed all the momentum for streaming to try their own, sad service.
Tbf Netflix barely managed to accomplish it either, at the start, so it must have been an extremely difficult task. Internet speeds, and more importantly reliability, were huge obstacles, but far more so were the labyrinthine rules and regulations of dealing with the content providers, which are still the top obstacles to people enjoying watching television entertainment today.
This video about it basically launched John Olivier's career in his at-the-time new show Last Week Tonight. If you don't want to watch it all, fast-forward to 4:08 and look at that graph, showing how Netflix was taken hostage from the ISPs for a few months until they caved and paid the additional premiums demanded (as he called it, a "mob shakedown") - though you really may enjoy watching the rest of it after that! (warning to any capitalists that watch it: you might not be by the time you get to the end...:-P)
So... I think I disagree with your language: it wasn't just that they "didn't" so much as they simply "couldn't" manage to get it done, maybe b/c they were not willing to be shitty enough? :-P