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Americans’ new TV habit: Subscribe. Watch. Cancel. Repeat. (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

103 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Many more people are jumping from one streaming subscription to another, a behavior that could have big implications for the entertainment industry.

…

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.

Non-paywall link

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 6 months ago (11 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 144 points 6 months ago (9 children)

I really don't understand why streaming business are so surprised. They are providing television for rent and users are renting it plain and simple.They seem to think they are entitled to lengthy subscriptions from users when in reality they aren't providing a service that's even stable or worth it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

Users: Fine if you want me to pay a monthly fee I'll only pay 3 months of the year.
Streaming services: Shook

[–] [email protected] 33 points 6 months ago (10 children)

Exactly. I want to watch 1 show and when I'm done I'm cancelling. I'm looking at your paramount plus.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yarr

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 6 months ago (3 children)

It just makes economic sense.

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.

Yeah, turns out when the monopolies are eliminated, people get more competition and a better deal on the consumer end. It's why I'll never understand people who say streaming services became as bad as cable.

One option for slowing the churn, executives think, is to bring back some element of the cable bundle by selling streaming services together. Executives believe consumers would be less inclined to cancel a package that offered services from multiple companies.

No, I'm less likely to cancel a service that's worth what you charge for it. Be happy you got one month out of me, and if you want more, offer me more value. Putting serialized shows out week by week doesn't do it for me either, because I'm just going to wait until the season is done to start watching it anyway.

Price sensitivity is also a factor. Americans with a streaming subscription are spending an average of $61 a month for four services, an increase from $48 a year ago, according to a new study by Deloitte. The increase was due to higher prices, not additional services. Nearly half the people surveyed said they would cancel their favorite streaming service if monthly prices went up another $5, the study said.

Mystery solved.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Yeah, turns out when the monopolies are eliminated, people get more competition and a better deal on the consumer end. It's why I'll never understand people who say streaming services became as bad as cable.

I'd argue that streaming is in such a bad place right now because each streaming service has a monopoly on their own content. Sure, you could argue that studios "compete" with each other on the content they produce, but I'd argue that cable companies were a different layer of the stack entirely. Cable companies all offered the same channels and the same content, and in areas where they did overlap, competition to offer the best delivery of those channels was great. What made cable bad was that there was little incentive for companies to geographically compete. In the era of streaming, companies have little incentive to allow their content to compete across platforms.

If you ask me, every streaming platform should be broken up from their production parents, so that streaming companies can compete on what they offer, and how they deliver it. There is no incentive for the platforms themselves to compete with each other. It's all about how hard the services can enshittify before people stop watching the content they have a monopoly on.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Cable companies still did the same practice too though, and even the ones that weren't cable providers still negotiated with the providers that if you got channel A in this tier of service, you must also get channel B, and then Disney brings in a certain amount of money per channel in a given bundle every month. No matter how you slice it, even with the problems above, what we've got now is better.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

I prefer the weekly release schedule of shows. It's something to look forward to and something to talk about week to week. A lot of people don't want to hear spoilers either. Releasing all at once leads to that.

I do think there are those who would subscribe instantly instead of waiting for all shows to be released. Not everybody, but enough of them to stay for two to three months instead of just one and done.

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