The latest price hikes come from Disney+, Hulu and Hulu + Live TV. Will this change your streaming service mix?
Will increasing prices change my streaming service mix? Not really. Iām currently splurging on Hulu and Netflix; my only regular pay streaming service is Peacock. I picked up Hulu over the holidays when they put it on sale for $2/month for a full year. If they offer it again for a super low sale price, Iāll probably continue my subscription. But modest price increases donāt bother me. Modest inflation is part of a normal, healthy economy.
Iām glad we have more of a choice on whether we want to watch adds or pay the price not to. I can either hit the pause button and go to the bathroom or just wait for the next add if I need to get up and get something. The one thing I donāt like on some of the streaming services is that you need the premium plan to get the full super duper HD effect but I can get by without it.
We found a streaming service that has some of our favorite foreign TV shows that you canāt get in the US. Itās free to use and usually just runs a 30-sec ad every 10 min.
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Given how much standard cable continues to rise---- itās still a deal.
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Iāve had DirecTV for years. Every year at this time, they end my promo rate but I just call them up and threaten to go streaming and they reinstate the promo rate for another year. Last few years it was a $50/month. This year they dropped it only $40 so a $10 increase in my bill. I can live with that.
I saw an article from May that said HULU + LIve TV was adding local PBS channels but it is not showing up in their lineup on their site. Anyone know when that is happening? Any streaming would have to have PBS for us. Just checking for future reference in case I do decide to go streaming.
PBS only costs $5 a month directly from them. Then the money goes directly to them.
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We have PBS passport. We give more than that to them. We donāt use it that much because we usually DVR PBS. There are some issues with the playback on passport. I havenāt used it in a while, but I think it doesnāt keep track of where you are in a series. Not a big deal. I guess I could live with using passport all the time.
We do OTA, Passport & Paramount and have DVR capability for both streaming stuff and OTA programing. Paramount recently bumped up their yearly fee so weāll probably bail on them come renewal time.
Paramount keeps track of where you are on streaming content and right now itās ad-free for 10/MO. We record the PBS streaming content before we watch it so itās easy to manage and portable while watching.
Unfortunately, we are too far from the transmitters for OTA.
PBS passport is great. I donate to my local public radio/NPR/PBS and get the Passport.
I get my local PBS stations on my TV antenna.
Pay for Streaking. We use Amazon Prime for what we save in shipping while watching purchase item costs from other sources. Amazon will do what they want and so will cost aware consumers. For us itās all about value received. We use monthly streaming subscriptions so when we have seen all we want to see from a service, we cancel and move on. When it costs us more to purchase thru Amazon, we will see them in our rear-view mirror.
If Amazon wanted to do the right thing, they should have made ad-free included with Prime but then they wouldnāt make nearly as much money. They raise the price of Prime itself frequently and now the separate price increase on Prime Videoā¦
For us, this may cost Amazon money as I plan to look into dropping Prime entirely when it comes up for renewal (we donāt watch Prime Video that often and waiting a week for packages isnāt the end of the world).
I understand the streaming services wanting to make higher profits but raising prices at the frequency and amount they have been in recent years may not be the way. For us, weāve dropped some streamers and are considering dropping some more. We will continue occasionally getting 1-2 months of one when we know there is something we want to watch on it but weāll be doing a lot less annual subs.
Unfortunately, we are now in a time of immodest inflation. Here in Southern NV our auto insurance has doubled and home insurance significantly raised, along with very high electric bills this summerā¦ I will probably drop Amazon since their streaming service has fewer shows that I watch and will have to wait longer for packages.
If you take a long view, it is fascinating (and saddening) how the TV/Movie industry has slowly changed thru the years so that you can see the day coming where watching anything without commercials will be all but impossible.
Several of my favorite theaters never re-opened after the pandemic, and those that did really only show the action hero movies blockbusters. Forget about anything beyond that.
So that is what Netflix et al are for, they say, āIād rather watch at home anyway!ā
And then streaming slowly kicked the legs out from under the cable industry who had already ramped up their prices and commercial slots to the point that classics had to have content cut out to make room for more ads, and the still the price would go up every year unless you called to ānegotiateā a more reasonable deal, which was a pain.
So people eventually cut the cord and flocked to online options. Which, until now wasnāt a bad option. But now, surprise surprise, the cost of streaming has reached the cost of cable for the most part.
And people say, āwell, Iāll just take the ad-supported version to save a few bucks. Iām happy to use those commercial breaks to run to the bathroom anywayā. But even I, with a bad prostate, donāt need THAT many breaks.
So we reach for our remote to skip the commercials, and whoops, none of that! Feel free to skip the program, but you WILL watch those commercials.
And maybe at the moment, the ad-supported versions arenāt horribly overloaded, but how long will that last as each year they squeeze in more and more?
So, we went from the days when cable offered premium content like HBO, to HBO just being another commercial channel, we lost our movie theaters, our DVRs, and our local video rental stores. There are suddenly very few ways to ālose yourselfā in a movie for a couple of hours.
Iāve always been willing to pay to enjoy the entire immersion experience, a nice movie theater, a premium movie package, rent a DVD, but I see the day coming where there will be effectively no way to avoid commercials, full-stop.
Will they soon be selling commercial slots to interrupt our dreams?
Some companies are clearly price gouging, which is maddening. The silver lining is when I end up shopping around for a replacement and find a provider thatās even less expensive than what I was paying previously.
Oddly, I donāt mind commercials during shows. However, when I am surfing trying to determine what to watch I about lose it when I select something and they front load a half dozen commercials before I can get the first look at the program. If I was undecided that just decided me and I move on.
LATEST STREAMING PRICE HIKE: Amazon Prime Video
Itās the backloading that kills me. They run the first 20 minutes of a movie to get you hooked, then increase the frequency of the interruptions until by the end they are doing 3 minutes of movie and 3 minutes of ads. Shows that are written to have breaks arenāt quite as annoying. Realty shows use the āwhen we come backā rtrick then when they come back they recap the entire show to stretch it into a longer program and make more space for ads. Yuck.