Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Dropping streaming services? You're not alone.

A report from the Wall Street Journal says that a quarter of streaming service subscribers have canceled at least three in the last year.

... consumers nationwide paring their streaming bills and getting more strategic about when they turn services on and off. Customer defections across premium streaming services rose to 6.3% in November, from 5.1% a year earlier.

About one-quarter of U.S. subscribers to major streaming services -- a group that includes Apple TV+, Discovery+, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock and Starz -- have canceled at least three of them over the past two years, according to November data from subscription-analytics provider Antenna. Two years ago, that number stood at 15%, a sign that streaming users are becoming increasingly fickle.

If you think about it, the number of those cutting back may be even higher. Those numbers are from last year. What about those that cut back in previous years? If they cut back even more, dropping only one or two services last year, they would be excluded from the survey results. But they still dropped services. And yes, those people exist. I'm one of those.

I cut back before last year. And I'm still cutting. I rotate services, but haven't used a couple of those in a year. My rotation of services, which used to be one every month, has skipped some months. I'm not always subscribing to even one service a month some of the time.

My Streaming Life has always been about saving money. And I'm using more and more free ad-supported television (FAST) services, and fewer paid services. And so are more people, it seems.

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