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

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.

Non-paywall link

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    Netflix […] tend to grandfather people into older plans, so whatever the price is they usually (tbf, not always) tend to honor

    Where’s this? I’ve yet to hear of this happening ever.

    • OpenStars@startrek.website
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      6 months ago

      I am so fucking confused right now. This article tries to talk about it, and even throws out the exact phrase “grandfathered into”, but it fails imho b/c after reading it I am more confused than I was before. Maybe there was a typo in it or something, or maybe the old plan was called “Basic”, instead of the new plan “Standard”… or something, but in any case unless you already had that plan from previously you cannot get onto it now. Nor do I have it, despite not having changed my plan in quite some time…

      TLDR: somewhere/somehow/someway things are changing, but whether that means anything or what precisely it means is not clear, plus that itself may change too as time goes on.

    • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      Grandfathered Basic is $11.99/month. It used to be $9.99, they raised it last November I want to say? As long as you don’t switch off the plan, you keep it, for now.