Stream Fatigue? Americans Spent 23% Less on Streaming Services in 2024, Study Finds
Stream Fatigue? Americans Spent 23% Less on Streaming Services in 2024, Study Finds
Don't forget the steady fracturing of media licenses across dozens of services, coupled with enhanced enshittification.
Everyone's focusing so much on exclusivity to draw people in while their service quality quickly jumps straight down the nearest manhole.
It’s just cable with extra steps at this point. More effort, more costly. Not worth it.
I think it's cable with fewer steps, but of course not as convenient as it used to be.
things we tried:
We're out of ideas... maybe we should utilize AI?
You forgot limiting quality on web browsers
platforming has-been comedians so they can cry about how they aren’t platformed anymore on our platform in a distinctly unfunny and joke-free manner
No no, I'm sure if they get Dave Chapelle to talk about how much he hates transpeople and sees no parallels between the on-going struggles of the African American and literally ANY other Rights Movement, then I'll magically start giving a shit about what's on Netflix!
Tough break big N, maybe I'll check you out when Steel Ball Run finally gets animated.... Or not because I could probably get an uncensored version on a pirate streaming site as long as I use my VPN
It's not fatigue, it's enshitification. We're not going to continue paying more for less. Bye!
Yaaaaar!!!
Hmm... Yeah this is why they're going after pirate sites because people pushing back.
If green line for streaming does not continue to go up, I expect the propaganda with VPNs will be targeted as "used by criminals" Or "exclusive to CSAM" with talks of senate or house about "banning" or "restricting" them "for the children" in 2025
This is more or less implied in project 2025 with all the age verification shit they want to implement at a national level to keep kids from learning that gay people are humans.
A depressingly prescient comment
Very simple rule fuckers. Ads and free or paid and no ads.
I'm done with streaming it only really worked when there was one, now they've saturated it to the degree it's pointless. Not only that but they keep raising prices for a worse service and now they have all went ad crazy on top of it.
I see no benifit to subscribing to any of them I'd rather watch free to air stuff if I have to see ads, and for anything else I'll hoist the black flag since I'd likely need about 10 subscriptions otherwise.
What killed it for me was Paramount moving all of Star Trek off Netflix when I was in the middle of a show. So, I moved to Paramount begrudgingly, and then they moved it to HBO. That's when I was done. That and the Netflix password sharing changes made up my mind, and I cancelled everything.
Plex has a surprisingly decent selection on the live tv/movies tab.
It probably would have worked with more than one service if they did what music did: almost everything is everywhere. If you pay for a music service, you almost certainly can find what you are looking for. (Hell, one doesn't even need to pay for Youtube and the vast majority is there too). Contrast with streaming services where each piece of content is likely only on one service.
No, I will not be paying for more than one streaming service, if your content isn't on the service I pay for, that is your problem, not mine.
I want to watch Stargate SG1. I hear people say it's on Prime Video, so I subscribe. It's not there. I guess being a filthy European makes me unworthy. So I bite the bullet and get a VPN. Now I'm paying what amounts to twice the price of the usual subscription. I start watching the series and guess what? It's leaving Prime in a few days. Motherf...
Never better served than with Piracy™!
I recommend grabbing the full collection plus related movies elsewhere.
Could have just bought it on dvd, much less stress
Check out your local library. Mine has physical disks of a lot of shows. With MakeMKV and Handbrake, and about an hour per disc (computer time- my time is maybe 5 minutes per), I can return the discs and watch the show at my leisure. If you have a ton of disk space, you can skip Handbrake and just keep the .mkv files...
I think what would save the streaming industry would be anti-exclusionary legislation. Prevent contracts where shows are exclusively produced for one streaming company. Then streaming platforms compete on cost, curation, and interface, not on exclusive content.
What would be smart is for them to develop a unified platform where they get a percentage of your subscription fee based on the media you watch.
I mean, shit on the music industry for all of their crappy practices, but 100% this. I pay for one music streaming service and have access to any music I want without having to think about which record label released which album. Why is it still illegal for studios to own movie theaters, but not streaming platforms?
Decouple the content creators from the content distributors.
I have none of them left. Same reasons as everyone else, the value is not there and it's a subscription that ticks money even when I don't use it.
Put ads in a service I pay for?
*cancelled!"
Too many services with too low quality content.
Once Upon a Time Netflix premiered a handful of huge shows and movies a season. Then they got addicted to watch metrics and decided everything should be "second screen content" from a firehose.
Now I don't watch any Netflix original until it's concluded or has rave reviews, because it's likely to get canceled in season 1 or just not be worth watching at all. And in the rare case it is great, gets picked up, and have rave reviews, they can still fuck it up like The Witcher.
Every other network is pretty much guilty of this too. I'm so, so over it. They have made me actually long for the option of a singular cable-like license I could get, because they are so shitty at maintaining their services and their catalogs are so poor now.
I just roll my own now and host a Plex server, because fuck em.
I don't even pirate Netflix shows because there's a good chance it will get canceled after one season. Why bother, knawmean
I hadn't noticed, but the consolidation has happened. The cycle completes as the phone and cable companies all have streaming bundles now. It's cable TV again in another form. Still horseshit, but that's going to be their collective play I guess
It always was. They tried sueing their way out of the loss of control, that didn't work, so they moved to backroom deals, until their power was once again consolidated.
I could get a seedbox running the ARR suite and Plex for cheaper than 1 subscription service per month
Why the fuck would I pay THEM for their WORSE service?
I wonder if 2+ years between seasons is also having an impact.
I pick up new shows way less than I did in the past because of this with the ones I do being more tied to whether it is a miniseries or source material I plan to read after the season ends to finish it out on my own.
Personally I think more time between releases is healthier for both the quality of the product and the now not perpetually consooming, consumer.
What really puts me off is that shows get canceled too often nowadays, even ones that do well because the service doesnt want to pay the cast better. So I tend to wait for shows to complete before I even consider them for my watchlist.
I haven't seen a quality improvement. Only a production improvement which had made the wait even worse when the long awaited seasons flop like The Boys and House of the Dragon.
It's reason I haven't bothered to get into shows like Severance despite good reviews, since I don't want to get hooked into yet another show that will take forever between seasons and not even be a guarantee to be worth the wait.
Yar harr fiddly dee dee
Why pay for 20 services offering 10 mid quality exclusives when I can pay for a VPN.
So many service raised their price and so many people cancelled their subscription in response, in summary: FAFO
We are cancelling some services. The value isn’t there, and we need the money. /shrug
Maybe they should try not being shitty and expensive?
No one has mentioned COVID and habits. Sure we aren't in lockdown, but it was literally the only thing to do a few years ago and people likely continued due to it be a comfort.
It has changed how we did things. As well as all the enshitifucation.
I honestly don't even care to watch things anymore anyway; This is probably closed minded of me to say but, I feel like I've already watched my favorite movie and my favorite tv show. If new stuff comes out that is good, that's great! but it's never going to be as meaningful to me as the things I watched as I grew up. Hollywood is old news, gaming is where it's at for me now.
I spent $0 and use free streaming instead. Pluto.tv, Tubi, Roku, and YouTube have plenty of shit to watch, not to mention other options. I had been a Netflix and Prime subscriber from the beginning (like, back when Netflix only shipped DVDs) but both companies kept getting shittier and charging more so I ditched them.
Sounds like they need to make it 25% more expensive next year. That will fix it!
If this is true, then somebody is already hurting.
Apparently price hikes did not hurt netflix though, so presumably peasants are cutting other merchants.
A small W but good to see that people denying these parasites profit.
If only more people would be more willing to sail the high seas to deny them all of the profit.
it's a service issue and some people still can't turn on a PC much less set up usenet.
There will always be a market for install app and gib card details plz.
I gave up on streaming entirely a few years ago, and now just collect physical media of various formats from Ebay, Yahoo Auctions, Amazon, thrift stores, antique stores, garage sales, and estate sales, etc.
For me, the main issue is the quality of content.
I have access to several streaming services, although all of them I pay for as part of some bundle where the streaming service isn’t my main motivator for subscribing. Netflix is bundled with my cell phone plan, Prime I use for delivery, Apple TV+ which is bundled with Apple One I use for news, music, and HomeKit secure video, and lastly HBO Max that I get with my cable subscription. I also ended up with one year of Hulu for free, but I forget where that came from.
I’d have no concern giving all of them up because I pay for a Usenet account. Combined with Radarr and Plex I have access to anything I want to watch.
Despite all this content, scrolling through my activity in Plex I haven’t watched a single movie released in 2024 since May when I watched the Dune: Part Two.
I don’t think people are motivated to subscribe to a service where the subscription doesn’t get you much of anything new. You might as well go to Goodwill and pick up some used DVDs and Blue-rays.
You had me at Usenet 😎
Usenet for me as well and my 32.7 TB NAS.
Spotify was the only service I had. Lost my job, cut back. Thought I'd be fine with some ads. Not like THAT I wasn't.
Thankfully I downloaded all my music first. Been too lazy to find a FOSS alternative to play it all.
I have Prime (for delivery savings) and still steal the shit they play. If I like it, I keep it. If not, I delete it. Backed up onsite and offsite. Fuck 'em. $100/yr. to Google gets me plenty of storage.
LOL, nothing new to me. I'm in an amazing, high-tech version of 1999. Fuck it. I'm stealing it. Again.
Plex with the plexamp app is pretty good for music playback. Otherwise anything that supports the subsonic API works too.
Are they including streaming from torrents in their study?
I think unintentialy, but yes. They talk about spending. I don't know what you usually pay for your torrents, but I don't think it will change the number much.
From my experience there are two ways to get torrents (aside from piratebay): you either get invited to a hosting site or you pay a big entry fee. There also is stuff like IPTV now which also costs monthly
My point is that I have been streaming for years, and I never spent more than $0 on it. So...fatigue? I dont know what they're talking about.
Streaming is free and great!
Can confirm. Got rid of everything this year except the YouTube Premium family plan. It gives us all the music of Spotify, tons of free movies and TV shows YouTube offers for streaming without ads, and of course all other YouTube videos without ads. You also get to play YouTube videos with your phone off, which is nice if you just want to go to sleep listening to something. And you get to add five different people, so we have me, my wife, my daughter and both mothers-in-law on the same plan. It's been really cost-effective. We're paying a fraction of what we paid before with a similar level of professional content that I actually care about watching (YouTube doesn't make most of the shows and movies they offer, so they tend to be ones they think people already like).
we have prime but streaming is not the primary reason although its a nice bonus basically. Mainly because of my wife though. Left to myself I would likely drop it.
Not fatigue but service issue.
Anecdotally Netflix is the best. Hulu, Peacock, Paramount, Disney and HBO. Are okay but feel like late 90s cable with a couple of good shows each month. We get these services when there's deal but cancel after it's over.
I think its more reflective that the price of streaming services continues to rise, while the value proposition does not. So why subscribe to all services at one time? You can only watch one at a time.
(Also, piracy is just so piss-easy for $5/mo)
normies are not redicalized enough but these media parasites working OT on pushing them to sail.
Setup a Digital Ocean droplet in Amsterdam, years ago. LOL, not even sure how to login to it, because I don't have to touch it.
OpenVPN -> connect -> thepiratebay.org -> Tixati -> done
Yeah, I could be more secure, do it better, good enough for me to steal movies and books.
Stremio & torrentio are free. Not sure if it works on googleTV. It doesn't on roku
Exactly. I finally cancelled Netflix a few weeks ago. It's too expensive and there's very little I want to watch on there any more. The shitty way they were trying to push you into more expensive plans was just the shit icing on the turd pie.
I'm now looking at Disney+ and Prime Video because there's hardly anything on those too that I like.
I hate the UI of prime video with a passion. From time to time I look for something to watch on it but I have the impression they try to keep me from causing traffic. After some minutes I give up and wonder why I didn't cancel yet.
I ditched Disney+ when they added 50% onto the price. The exit questionnaire was annoying as it had one answer that lumped in “can’t afford it” with “too expensive” which implies it’s a “me” problem when it was definitely a “them” problem.
I would have ditched Amazon Prime when they added adverts with an optional 50% price hike to remove them but my wife didn’t want to lose the prime delivery.
The intention is that we subscribe to Disney+ for a few months a year and catch up on what we missed.
My wife has put on a few different Netflix original shows over the holidays, and they're all sooo stupid. Their supposed best shows are complete garbage.
Kids make it complicated for sure, but we managed to drop Disney. Honestly I’d prefer they were on screens less anyway.
and on top of that inflation everywhere else is causing people to have less discretionary funds.
Next step is only annual contracts.
This would destroy their subscriber bases. Not even cable required an annual subscription and there were many more hoops to jump through to subscribe and cancel.
This will only increase until there is sufficient backlash or, god forbid, Government oversight. These CEOs are getting hooked on the concept of being paid continuously for the same widget. Not only will these services get more predatory, but subscription models will continue to proliferate even into unlikely and surprising places.
That's my official end of year, forward looking, very lukewarm take for 2024.
Was it BMW that was trying to charge a subscription for seat warmers and automatic car starters that were built into the car already? They got serious push back and rolled back fast. Haven't followed in a while wouldn't be surprised if they were back to that model already.