Consumers Cut Streaming Services In 2024 After Endless Price Hikes And Enshittification
from the history-repeats-itself dept
Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.
That has involved chasing pointless “growth of growth’s sake” megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions — all while simultaneously cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.
Customers are reacting. According to Review’s annual State of Consumer Media Spending Report, the average American spent 23 percent less on streaming subscriptions in 2024 than in 2023. Not because streaming was cheaper, but because customers are being more particular about which streaming service they subscribe to in a bid to do something about soaring costs:
“A total 27.8% of Americans report experiencing “streaming fatigue,” defined as that exact feeling of being overwhelmed with the increasing number of streaming apps.”
Hunting and pecking through eight different streaming services to find the programs and movies you like is getting increasingly annoying, especially when every one of those services is now intent on constant rate hikes and nickel-and-diming users with stuff like password sharing crackdowns.
If Trump 2.0 truly delivers on its obvious plan to dismantle what’s left of U.S. consumer protection, labor rights, and corporate oversight, there’s a not insubstantial risk consumers will face higher costs then ever, driving them to tighten their purse strings further.
Here’s where Cory Doctorow’s enshittification truly steps in.
The reduced revenues from people cancelling streaming services for months at a time will create new pressure on streaming giants to deliver Wall Street those sweet quarterly returns. Streaming profitability was already a challenge (NBCUniversal’s Peacock has always bled money). Improving service quality and expanding catalogs won’t be at the top of the executive menu.
So now the race will be on to thrill Wall Street and goose revenues in other ways. That means more price hikes, more pointless mergers (see: the whole AT&T Time Warner Discovery mess), and more bizarre restrictions. I’d also suspect they’ll soon take another terrible cue from traditional cable: cutting corners on customer service, and making it increasingly difficult to cancel service without headaches.
At which point the customer annoyance accelerates, free services like piracy become even more attractive, and the disruption/evolution cycle begins all over again.
Filed Under: cord cutting, password sharing, streaming, streaming fatigue
Comments on “Consumers Cut Streaming Services In 2024 After Endless Price Hikes And Enshittification”
Another awful side-effect of this may also be that as services become more desperate, they will be less and less willing to greenlight shows with interesting(read: risky) concepts, leading to a further degradation in content quality.
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And at the same time, refusing to take risks will make it harder for them to take risks in the future, and the further enshittification as a result will shrink their capabilities even further.
Literally a corporate death-spiral.
I think “Here’s where Cory Doctorow’s enshittification is truely dragged onto the scene” is a slightly more accurate.
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I’m not sure what you mean. The streaming services are doing it eagerly, not reluctantly.
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That’s my point. The screaming services are eagerly dragging enshittifcation onto the scene. Enshittification isn’t creeping up onto the scene uninvited.
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“Dragging” implies a sense of unwillingness, though. The streaming services are foisting enshittification upon said services with full knowledge and approval. If anything, they’re inflicting enshittification.
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I was trying to humorously imply they were more eager for enshittifcation than enshittifcation itself.
But at this point the humor isn’t really going to work. oh well.
PS. Another comment delay by the web server erroneously emitting 429 (twice. because I guess waiting for > 10 minutes isn’t good enough)
Already started at home. Netflix has 2 fewer subscribers along my family plus myself. Dysney+ was cut by another relative and it’s only surviving at home because of the kid. Prime is virtually dead. I’m the only one left and this may change soon. Max is a joke and nobody has it anymore except me because I got a lifetime 50% discount from the start but they obviously degraded the quality with ads. Tehere is one relative that ditched all and went Stremio.
Yes, as it is, people would download a car.
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I have netflix, Amazon Prime(shipping still matters to me Video is a bonus), Disney+ for my child and I have HBO through my cell phone plan. I’m pretty much not going to be adding anymore to that. I will subscribe to peacock for a couple of months one in octobe and again in may for halloween movies and eurovision. Other than that they won’t get anything from me.
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If you search for something like “free Amazon shipping without Prime”, you can find some workarounds that might be acceptable. For example, if you’re patient, some people will accumulate $25 worth of stuff for free standard shipping, which may take a few extra days. Or apparently “Amazon Household” can be used to share shipping and video benefits with one other adult (at a different address in the same country, at least till Amazon enshittifies it).
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Or at least the files necessary to 3D print one.
Half-jokingly I expect streaming services to start charging by the hour a la the early days of AOL. Only then will peak enshitification be achieved.
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It’s only half a joke, because Prime’s effectively doing it by forcing ads before every hour or so.
Stop blaming Wall Street
Corporate executives are remunerated with stock. When the share price goes up, they get more money.
Eliminate stock incentives, and the problem goes away, or is greatly reduced.
(Oh! But think of all the traders!!) /sarcasm
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Eliminate monopolies. In other words, copyright. Or, at least, strongly regulate and limit them.
I’d like to see that happen in a more bottom-up way, though. How about we stop talking about “piracy”, as if there’s something immoral about participating in culture while refusing to support this monopoly? And how about some of the people making shows and films refusing to deal with the copyright-maximalists?
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Problem does not go away when potential customers lack adequate resources to make such luxurious purchases.
Not sure, streaming services will simply offering more different plan to maximize what people need to pay depending of their usage.
You’ll get a free access with about 1000 old movies and
if you want to watch up to 10 recent movies a week, pay an extra $2. To up to 20 movies, $5. You can get a pack with the latest plus all other Star Wars movies during 48h for an extra $5. You’ll get sales on January, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Price hikes during Christmas.
It’s simply what telcos are doing, after trying to convince people that their offers are truly unlimited, they’re just stacking many fees to remove every possible limit.
The services you have to pay for are becoming more annoying than the services that are free (but have ads). People expect value for their money, and they’re not getting it (or getting less and less of it every year). I’m down to one service that I’ve had for about a decade, and the price hasn’t changed in all that time (grandfathered). If I were to pick up another service, then it would only be for a month or two now and then to watch specific movies and/or shows. This is about all the services are worth of my time.
Next week, on Techdirt: Simulive streaming!
In order to retain customers, streaming services start restricting series to being displayed one episode a week, in order from first to last.
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That, also, has already happened.
Look at the Landman release dates, for example. It’s actually become somewhat common. Of course, given the streaming companies’ penchants for abruptly cancelling shows—they’re worse than Fox was, back when broadcast networks mattered—it seems foolish to start watching before an acceptable ending has been confirmed. (And if nobody’s watching, it will be cancelled; someone already mentioned “death spirals”…)
I’m already there. It got to the point where I was paying Netflix for the one show I wanted to watch on there, paying Amazon for the one show I wanted to watch on there and paying Apple for, yes, the one show I wanted to watch on there. So I’ve stopped all of them.
This market fragmentation is the thing that will drive streamers back to torrenting. Why should I pay three monthly subscriptions when I can get the same content for free from one location?
You know what would be good? Some sort of service provider that aggregates all the popular streaming shows into one convenient place with one monthly subscription. Maybe it could be delivered on a cable that goes to your house.
Go to the library and read a book.
This is us
In 2018 we were Comcast cable TV customers.
Comcast was $1514/year in December 2018
We switched to streaming services and saved a fair amount.
But, then our streaming costs crept up to $2000/year.
So, last month, we did a cost analysis and our costs are down to $1226/year.
We are now mentally prepared to do this analysis every year.
We watch zero sports.
Re: paid streaming sucks
i have a 12 tb hard drive and pirate everything because its free. no time to sign up for 1 streaming service after another. and i have access to almost any tv show within 5 minutes after its available for download. ill take the repetitive roku tv ads over nonstop price hikes
Such surprise, etc.
I quite honestly can’t even work myself up even a little bit over it. It’s been blindingly obviously doomed as a business model from day one. How many thousands of posts and comments, internet-wide, have decried each and every step along the road to Shitville, to absolutely no effect whatsoever?
I say we save ourselves some trouble and start encouraging the disease. At least if we actively help these firms into their graves I’m hoping whatever tries replacing them can get off the ground without being annihilated by the established outfits and whatever Congress pets they currently own.
We subscribe to nothing
It’s too expensive, it’s too difficult, and there is very little worth watching. And we’ve discovered that we don’t miss it — especially since we have a large library of physical media.
The only complication is sports, and for that, well…yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, me hearties! We would pay for it if someone, anyone, offered a sensible plan, but nobody does. The last time I checked on what we’d need to follow 4 pro sports teams and 2 universities’ teams, we’d need 4 different subscriptions and 2 of those come with all kinds of restrictions and blackouts that mean we wouldn’t even get all the games we paid for.
Typical night at our house:
“Did you want to watch a movie?”
“Sure! What about that one we liked from years ago?”
“Sounds nice, let me see if it is on any streaming services we have….
Nope. Not available anywhere.”
“Too bad. What about some episodes of that show?”
“Ok.
Whoops, it’s not streaming anymore. Looks like we can only rent it from the usual places.”
“Oh well. I guess I will just read my book.”
“Sounds good, I’ll do the same.”
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You’d have the same problem if you refused to own any books, and were just subscribing to some services and hoping one of them would temporalily license a book to you whenever you want to read it.
Buy physical media
If you want to watch that show over and over, buy the physical media. That way, it’ll never jump to another streaming service or be removed because the copyright holder got into a fight with the streaming service, or the service decided the show isn’t worth showing any more.
Oh, wait, the same studios that run the streaming services are also cutting back on physical media.
Huh, I guess some shows and movies will just disappear forever, like the Batgirl movie and the Willow TV show.
relying on streaming a losing proposition
Spinning-rust HDDs have become cheap enough, and disc ripping tools prevalent enough, that anything you want long-term is best acquired as physical media that you then rip to store yourself. A Raspberry Pi with a media server package, plugged into an outboard HDD, makes for a cheap NAS solution you can then play back on your preferred screen.
I think “Here’s where Cory Doctorow’s enshittification is truly invited onto the scene” is more accurate.
Several
We cut several and won’t be going back. It’s cheaper just to buy the occasional season instead of continuously paying for streaming.