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.
So I was thinking about subbing to Netflix again to watch something, and they had already deleted my account (it’s been about a year). So I went to my email to just try and verify that I was trying to login using the correct email address.
While doing this I found a statement from 2018. The price of Premium Netflix then was $13. Now it’s $23 I think. And they cracked down on password sharing so the service isn’t even as good, really.
Every one of these services has raised prices over and over, boiling us frogs in the pot, so it’s no wonder everyone now just subs for a month or two then bounces. It’s smart. The companies here are the stupid ones, chasing the all-mighty “line-go-up” quarterly statement MBA shit when they could have had loyal customers for years and years. I think I had a Netflix account for at least a decade or more (back when it was just mailing DVDs) until they started jumping the price by a few bucks every six months. It’s just not worth it to keep services around waiting for a show or two to come back.