From USA Today:
“Tired of too many subscriptions?
Apple TV+, Disney+ streaming launches add to overload”
There are thousands of free
streaming movies and TV shows out there, but rarely any are commercial-free.
USA TODAY The average household subscribes to three video streaming services. It
can be hard to figure out just what you subscribe to. A look at how. The
promise of subscriptions often is convenience. Quick test: Ask yourself how many
subscriptions you’re on the hook for. Hard
to blame you for failing to come up with a number, or for feeling overwhelmed
at the mere prospect of trying. Let's see. There’s TV or internet for shows,
music services such as Spotify and Apple Music, maybe some newspapers or
magazines. Don’t forget the cloud storage where you keep all those precious
photos and videos, and that identity
theft protection you need because of all of the data breaches, holes and hacks.
Overwhelmed yet? We're not done.
There are the meal kits and razor
blades delivered to your doorstep to make life easier. Then there’s wardrobe you
swap out and have delivered on a regular basis through Rent the Runway. Maybe
that extends to your ride, a car subscription that lets you drive your vehicle
of choice. That’s not even counting the apps, cellphone service, online
genealogy, home security monitoring, audio and e-books, ink cartridges,
videogame catalogs and that health-tracking service you forgot about that you
pay for each month. Then there are those expired free 30-day trials you've long
forgotten about still an unseen part of your world.
Feeling oversubscribed? Or maybe
over being subscribed.
Subscription fatigue is on the verge of reaching
epidemic proportions. What's more, the trend toward getting you to sign up is
getting more intense when it comes to streaming media. The spectrum of apps and
services, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO, Showtime and YouTube, is
about to get even more crowded with the advent of Apple TV+, HBO Max (from
AT&T), Peacock (from Comcast/NBCUniversal) and Disney+. Streaming wars: Netflix says it will retain
the streaming crown; not worried about Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus There are
more than 300 video services streamed over the Internet (or what they call
"over-the-top"), says Deloitte vice chairman Kevin Westcott, who
leads the company’s U.S. telecommunication, media and entertainment practice. “That
tells you we definitely have a problem,” he says. For the record, the average household
subscribes to three.
Why do we subscribe?
As we transitioned to this
sharing economy, we’ve seen “that globally, people have become more inclined to
say that they want subscription-based services rather than to outright own
something,” says Virna Sekuj, strategic insights manager with the GlobalWebIndex
market research firm. Sekuj says one of the motivators to the subscription or
membership model is the upfront cost, especially driven by millennials who grew
up with tech and during the Great Recession. "It's given people access to
things that they may normally not have been able to do."
How many subscriptions are too
many?
“Things are getting absurd,”
behavior analyst Sean McCoy tweets in response to a USA TODAY question on the
topic. Though he’s had subscriptions for years to multiplayer online
role-playing games, he says, “my wife and I just took inventory and weeded
(out) anything we didn’t really need.” The impulse to subscribe to a video
service may be largely built around the idea of convenience. That's the promise
anyway. The basis of the old cable model was that all this content was
aggregated in one place, and your TV subscription is very likely bundled with
broadband in the home. “If only there were one service that could
bring me all the content in one easy box. Oh wait, it's called cable, and it's
been around for 40 years,” says Andy Gibs a Northern New Jersey father of two. Dana
Strong, president of Comcast’s Xfinity Consumer Services, says the company’s X1
platform was created in part to help reduce the friction consumers may
experience in leaving one video app for another or leaving linear TV for
on-demand programming. “Having the ability to elevate the content out
of the app into an integrated search engine and user interface makes the
content discovery that much easier, particularly when you connect it with a
voice remote," she says. If you’re a cord-cutter looking to ditch cable,
your motivation may have more to do with saving money – why pay extra loot to
the cable guys for hundreds of channels you never watch? But there are no
guarantees you’ll come out ahead financially. "My husband insisted on cutting the cable
and switching to multiple streaming services," Deb McAlister Holland wrote
on Facebook. "I can’t articulate how much I hate it. Terrible user
interfaces. Half a dozen separate sets of preferences to update. Annual fees.
Monthly fees. Delays of days, weeks, or months before TV shows are
available." By 69% to 65%, streaming video has edged ahead of traditional
pay TV, according to a recent Deloitte survey of more than 2,000 U.S.
consumers. But it’s not an either/or proposition; 43% of U.S. consumers have
both.
But which one(s) do I need?
Consumers may feel compelled to
sign up for multiple video subscriptions because quite frankly this or that
service is the only place to go watch some program all their friends are
telling them you to binge on. Access to
original programming created by the service itself – think Amazon and Netflix –
was cited as a chief benefit for 55% of more than 23,000 U.S. internet
subscribers ages 16 to 64 who pay for streaming video surveyed in April by
GlobalWebIndex. More than half also cited being able to watch across multiple
devices. That’s what Apple will be banking on when it launches shows around
such stars as Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon as part of Apple TV+. It’s
another play by the company to attract and keep customers within its ecosystem.
Unfortunately, as shows are spread out across numerous services, chasing
content may take a lot more effort on consumers' part and cost you more than
they counted you were counting on. Just ask a frustrated parent lamenting the
fact that Disney pulled its content off Netflix in favor of its own
soon-to-launch Disney+ service. As a consumer, “you want to pick an ecosystem
that’s neutral,” says Dave Shull, the new CEO of TiVo, the struggling DVR
pioneer that is attempting to reinvent itself while trying to help viewers
navigate content chaos. “It’s interesting to me the last couple of weeks to
watch Disney+ and Netflix starting to fight. The benefit and promise of TiVo is
I am never going to be a content provider. Those guys have much bigger pockets
than we do, and they’ll fight it out.”
Does all this actually save us
money?
For many consumers, it may be a
challenge just getting a handle on what they already pay for, and those “trial”
subscriptions to some app or rates for a product they signed up for years ago
and simply forgot about. If the bill automatically renews online, customers
don’t get that monthly statement in the mail to remind them.
You probably pay more for subscriptions than
you think.
An analysis last year by the
WestMonroe consulting firm of 2,500 Americans’ budgets, spanning 21 categories
of subscription services, found that 84% of people underestimated what they
spent each month. The average person forked over about $237 for the categories
in the study. Bootstrap Media managing director Gene DeRose describes the
problem of subscription fatigue as a feeling of complete bewilderment. “We’re
all more than ever innocent victims of the blood wars between big tech players,
who could easily enable all of these systems to more elegantly talk to each
other but refrain from doing so because they're wired to keep all the bricks in
place in their respective walled gardens, lest they lose leverage.” Consumers
may gain back a bit of leverage by sharing subscriptions. Eighty percent of the
respondents to the GlobalWebIndex said they share a TV/movie streaming
subscription with at least one other person; half of those share a premium
music plan. The complexity that comes with subscription overload may introduce
another problem: “It's not as much subscription fatigue as it is password
fatigue,” says Jeff Dorgay, publisher of ToneAudio
.
Where to go to cancel
The most prudent remedy for
consumers is to take the time to figure out which services they are paying for.
The first place to start is credit card statements. Do a bit of digging to see
which recurring charges are attached to your smartphone and other Android or
iOS devices. For Android users, start in the Google Play store and sign into
your Google Account. Tap Menu, Subscriptions and choose the subscriptions you
want to wave bye-bye to. Follow the instructions from there. To get started on
an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings, tap your name at the very top, then choose
the Subscriptions on your potential hit list. You can always follow the path
McCoy and his wife took. Reach out to every service you rarely, if ever, use
and utter three simple words: “Cancel my subscription.”
^ There are way too many subscription
services (video, music, TV, Movies, books, clothes, food, etc.) I only
subscribe to two and both are streaming services (Netflix and Amazon Prime.) I
used the Netflix DVD service for years after moving to my mountain and switched
to Netflix Streaming in October 2018 when my Internet service was upgraded and
I could finally watch streaming movies/shows. As for Amazon Prime, I started
getting them a few years ago because I could order things that I can’t get
locally and they are delivered right to my house by either Fed Ex or UPS as opposed
to the USPS where I have to drive a mile down to my mailbox, get a package slip
and then drive to the next town to get my package. Since Amazon Prime includes
Streaming movies and shows I have also been able to use that service since
October 2018. Even though I only have two subscriptions I still get all the ads on TV, regular mail, e-mail, etc. for all the different subscription services telling me why I need to start using them. ^
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