Americans’ New TV Habit: Subscribe. Watch. Cancel. Repeat.
www.nytimes.com
Many more people are jumping from one streaming subscription to another, a behavior that could have big implications for the entertainment industry.

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

    • circuscritic@lemmy.ca
      182·
      7 months ago

      Plex is deep in the enshitification process. I’d consider spinning up Jellyfin alongside it so you switch relatively painlessly when you decide that Plex’s bullshit has gone too far.

      Even if you never reach that point, it’ll be useful to have a media server that won’t lock you out if you ever lose your Internet connection for an extended period of time

      No reason they can’t run alongside each other, in case your concerned about resources or storage.

      • Scrollone@feddit.it
        41·
        7 months ago

        I agree with you; Plex is completely enshittified. Unfortunately, Jellyfin still lacks apps for some platforms, even though they recently added webOS (old versions included) so the situation is slowly getting better.

      • Omgboom
        32·
        7 months ago

        You can change the settings in Plex and still access it locally without Internet connection. But yeah Plex is kinda behind the curve on a lot of things, although jellyfin has it’s own issues

        • circuscritic@lemmy.ca
          52·
          7 months ago

          Plex requires an account and that account has to connect to an external Plex authentication server every so often. If that token expires and you have no internet, you will be locked out of your Plex.

          • Omgboom
            51·
            7 months ago

            You can disable auth on your local network. I’ve never experienced any issues with my authentication token expiring without having Internet, and I had my Plex server offline for months last year while I was living in a place that didn’t have Internet. For some reason though it runs noticeably shittier without Internet, it takes a long time for a video file to load.