Americans’ new TV habit: Subscribe. Watch. Cancel. Repeat.
Many more people are jumping from one streaming subscription to another, a behavior that could have big implications for the entertainment industry.
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Americans are getting increasingly impulsive about hitting the cancellation button on their streaming services. More than 29 million — about a quarter of domestic paying streaming subscribers — have canceled three or more services over the last two years, according to Antenna, a subscription research firm. And the numbers are rising fast.
The data suggests a sharp shift in consumer behavior — far from the cable era, when viewers largely stuck with a single provider, as well as the early days of the so-called streaming wars, when people kept adding services without culling or jumping around.
Among these nomadic subscribers, some are taking advantage of how easy it is, with a monthly contract and simple click of a button, to hopscotch from one service to the next. Indeed, these users can be fickle — a third of them resubscribe to the canceled service within six months, according to Antenna’s research.
“In three years, this went from a very niche behavior to an absolute mainstream part of the market,” said Jonathan Carson, the chief executive of Antenna.
Just the fact that the author here is using the word "impulsive" in conjunction with canceling services tells me that this is just guilt based propaganda trying to put a negative spin on this. No thanks, you can fuck off.
Americans new habit: Being poor.
Millennials new impulse buy: food and rent.
Wasting money on impulsive grocery purchases like vegetables and bread when they could be subscribing to every streaming service.