Americans’ new TV habit: Subscribe. Watch. Cancel. Repeat.

MicroWave@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 301 points –
Americans’ New TV Habit: Subscribe. Watch. Cancel. Repeat.
nytimes.com

Many more people are jumping from one streaming subscription to another, a behavior that could have big implications for the entertainment industry.

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.

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The hard part is saving for all the expensive hard drives. That's my next step.

You can use the money you saved by cancelling your streaming services. assuming an average of two streaming services thats like £22 a month.

Secondhand electronics shops sell used hard drives dirt cheap.

I wouldn't trust those drives with any data i want to keep but if it's just movies that could be redownloaded then who cares?

A couple months down the line you could add redundant drives and then re-downloading isn't even a consideration any more. dead drive? pull it, replace it, sync... done

With the added benefit of improving your server management skills