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Are you cancelling streaming services? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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With the simultaneous rollout of restrictions on account sharing and price increases/addition of advertising, I’m cutting back severely on streaming services.

I allowed my streaming subscriptions to grow without thinking about it. Without trying to remember the constant merging and bundling, I was subscribed to probably a dozen services at one point. They ranged from Netflix and HBO and Hulu to Shudder and Showtime. I had Paramount, Criterion, Disney, Peacock, and others. I’d do the typical thing where I’d search for a movie, find it is exclusive to a platform, and grab the free trial and forget to cancel. I excused it if I found a movie even every couple of months on it. There were still nights where it’d take an hour to find something I wanted to watch. I was probably closing in on $200/month all told, and I don’t have sports subscriptions.

I’m interested in learning what other people are doing regarding the price hikes and service compromises. Are you cancelling? Are you taking advantage of bundles with your internet services? Are you rotating on some interval? Or are you not changing at all?

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I never subscribed to the scam of streaming services to begin with and no one should.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Curious how they're a "scam"?

Media rights, exclusive content and pricing are often ridiculous, but the end users gets what they're paying for.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

But the scam comes when Netflix mislead consumers about what was available on the service. Netflix for a long time marketed itself as a place where you had access to most every movie you wanted. But the streaming service quickly became inferior to the physical media service (rip). So for 15+ years, there were tens of thousands of titles available on the DVD service, that were not available on the digital service. And there was no indication that there was a difference between the two. So if you wanted to watch "Heat" on Netflix, you could. But only via the the physical media, not on-demand. Now you can't actually watch Heat at all. Same with basically every movie from before the 90's.

Additionally the "scam" comes from the disjunction between the consumer expectation from the marketing and the reality. You can of course watch a movie on Netflix on one day, but the next day you have to "explore title related to the move you were looking for." Which I see as a scam. If i'm going to pay for a streaming service, every movie I want, should be available forever if it's ever available at all.