About 40% of Americans have cut back on streaming services in the last three months because of financial concerns, according to a recent report
Americans are quitting subscription streaming services in droves as the cost of living continues to climb, a recent report has found.
Streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu have become increasingly popular in recent years, but Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends report, released late last month, shows how Americans are getting frustrated over the cost to have their favorite movies and TV shows at the click of a button.
“As the cost of everyday essentials like food and housing remain high, many consumers are reevaluating their budgets and cutting back on nonessential expenditures,” Deloitte said in its survey results. “At the same time, prices for media and entertainment services continue to climb.”
Has Netflix tried not going to Starbucks as often, or not eating Avocado Toast?
Have you seen their job ads? My job which is in business operations is paying $480k. In the real world it pays about $80-100k.
Wasn’t their big deal for years “we pay you well but fire your if we think you’re not worth it any more” which might just be saying the quiet part out loud.
That or maybe enough got cut and were all shocked Pikachu that they backed away from it.
Either way I don’t really understand why they continue to have tech company status. They were definitely pioneering streaming but you can build a streaming service in a couple months using AWS to solve the harder problems.
I don’t know man, after using Netflix, Disney, and Paramount (and jellyfin) apps on my TV, it’s wild how much more responsive the UI is on Netflix compared to everything else.
On your first paragraph, every place will drop you in a heartbeat these days.
Sure but a nice web app was not really what they were pioneering. The entities you listed don’t need none nice apps they are the only source for their content. That’s the business Netflix is now in.
Where is it? If it’s in the Bay Area you won’t be able to afford a house on that meager pittance
It’s actually LA and I, ironically, now live in the Bay Area.
My Jellyfin server is doing great. My only constraint is my free disk space
Jellyfin is the way. Streaming only made sense when prices were low and all the content was basically in one place.
I’ll just keep growing my personal library.
Yea, fucking AI making it too expensive to be a data hoarder. I have to keep making hard decisions on which media to delete.
I’m kicking myself now for not buying more 20 TB hard drives when they were under $250. It’s rough out there for any computer related hobbies right now.
Which is why it can make sense to pay for pirate shares.
Many are around $5-8/mo, and they’re libraries are bigger than my own, with the added bonus of I don’t have to do any maintenance.
$60 to $98 per year, is a better deal than paying for these HDD prices. For me at least the trade-offs are worth it.
Private torrent tracker groups are better and free
Dude. Tell me more.
What would you like to know?
How does a fella get piped into those private torrent tracker groups?
Not at these storage costs, which was my point.
should be some cheap storage hitting the second hand market, when this AI bubble pops
Waiting for the AI bubble to pop
Same! I actually still have a decent amount of free space though, but my library is still growing.
I’m even using jellyfin in the car with android auto to listen to music. Recently bought a external blu-ray drive so I can rip all my old CD’s and DVD’s so at least some of my data is legit :D
Pinchflat right into the jellyfin server. Tada!
I had to resort to used SAS drives on my server.
You can get them pretty cheap, but you absolutely have to run a full smart test and check the error correction log before using.
Plus they usually come with 5 years power on time minimum, so you’d only want to run them in any RAID/ZRAID combo that has redundancy.
Couple of people here mentioned re-encoding, but that also harms the seed count if you’re using BitTorrent as the exchange medium.
Part of the issue is that Bluray remux rips are usually in H.265 at 10 bit with Dolby Vision which pushes 4K file size into the 70-100Gb range.
That’s fine for a single movie on a bluray disk, but its atrocious for saving multiple onto a drive or NAS.
But then most encodes still almost all use H.265 or H.264 which still gives you a fat 30Gb file for 4K.
I’m pretty sure AV1 solves this issue because it has much better compression compared to H.265, especially for higher pixel content, but no Blurays are using AV1 because there’s no reduced cost in forcing a change in consumer hardware.
Plus I think AV1 technically doesn’t support Dolby Vision in proper yet.
But then most encodes still almost all use H.265 or H.264 which still gives you a fat 30Gb file for 4K.
So you can store over 500 films on a 2TB HDD. I’m failing to see the issue.
I think you need to check your math.
I’m sure Netflix, Hulu, and similar services will compensate for subscriber losses in the usual manner: by continuing to increase their prices and further screwing over their remaining subscribers. You know, the time-honored cable/satellite TV strategy.
In fact, that’s already been happening for several years. Which is why (along with them offering mostly shit content that I never watched) I cancelled almost all my streaming services a couple of years ago.
I just got a notice from them saying they’re increasing prices and “are here for me if I have questions “.
Uh huh.
I have a question:
WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU RAISING PRICES EXPECTING PEOPLE TO STAY SUBSCRIBED IN THIS ECONOMY, NETFLIX?!
In this case my question was “where’s the cancellation button?”
Been a member since 2011. Not paying $30 a month for this.
Because like absolutely all public companies, they need to grow their revenues every year without ever a pause, and once you have reached the maximum number of subscribers you think you can get, the only path left to increase your revenues is to increase the revenues per subscriber.
Besides, these companies have been enshittifying their services so badly over the years that there is no one left among managers who can imagine they wouldn’t get away with it.
I don’t give them 5 years before they resolve to shady tactics like phone calls during which they trick you in agreeing to upgrade to a higher grade subscription, or make the cancellation so difficult that you end up paying a few more months, etc.
I thought it would’ve been because they keep getting less value for money, since the services keep raising prices and fisting more ads into people.
Doritos lost marketshare because they cost $7. Consumers are acting on economic realities.
$7?!? How big was that bag of Doritos?
Probably smaller than it used to be for $5
Not big enough apparently
I love you more than words can describe.
Prices will increase so shareholders don’t lose any money, and morons who go, “Durr… what do I care? They provide a service I like and I have so much money I can afford to be an idiot feeding an unsustainable economic distortion in perpetuity!” will just keep right on paying the increases, and the division of the K-shaped economy will continue to grow.
There’s no way way to boycott or frugal your way out of price increases while enough bougie yuppie shitheads are willing to eat any shit a company is willing to shovel them at any cost as long as they can use it as a status symbol.
That plus they’re full of trash.
Shoutout Dropout tho.
It wasn’t just the cost for me. It was the rise of fascism in the world in general and the fact that they are selling my watching history to everyone and anyone. Right now, they say it’s for advertising and development, but I wasn’t waiting around to have my content label me as undesirable.
Less important, but still a factor, was the fact that these services are constantly removing queer content and cancelling good shows. I stand by the idea that the only reason Kaos got cancelled was because it has a trans character. With the Paramount merger doomed to happen, I imagined there was going to be another purge, so fuck them.
I also can’t stand watching any of those show
No more bread, no more circuses. What comes next?
The threat of someone in a weird dress will tell your kid “it’s okay to be gay”, which is “literally pedophilia”, and if you push back against it, they’ll say “um, ackchually, I meant «political pedophilia», which is still very bad because these children are being stripped of their right to make up their mind whether it’s okay to be gay”. (This actually happened in Hungary.)
I know several people, mostly older people, who have gone back to old-timey, off-the-antenna TV. I suspect this will become a trend.
why? the ads are 40% of the airtime.
even with ad service streaming, you are only seeing like 10-20% ads.
Because over-the-air is free?
Like free-free.
mmm, lemme see now, $200/mo for a bunch of streaming services, subscriptions, diminishing ota/cable sports options…
OR…
$10/mo for all the above, plus many more expanding options?
aaar!!
$10/month? What high seas service are you using?
I pay $34 a year for RealDebrid.
iptv for 5 connections. RD doesn’t do live tv, unless you know better. I also use rd, torbox, and debridio.
I think the next big thing is affordable local entertainment. What’s old is new again. I could be wrong.
where is that offered?
local entertainment in my city is easily $100 a night now. For few hours.
Even when I go tot a cheap concert in a cheap place, it’s $25 to get in, and about $25 for two shitty drinks. $50 bare minimum, add food or any extras easily doubles. You want a place that isn’t shitty? those prices double or triple. Dive bars are now charging $10 for a shitty draft beer. 8 buck for a shitty bottle beer.
Most of the cost is the venue upkeep and the labor, which are fixed costs that keep escalating. it’s not the cost of the food and other stuff, that’s gone down.
The days of going out and hanging out for hours for $5-10 are never coming back. Every spot like that near me has closed, or cut back their hours to 10-3 or something mid-day only. even cheap places like coffeeshops have time limits for sitting down, like 30m tops or they have reduced/removed seating because they do not want people hangout there anymore.
things used to be cheap because wages were cheap and property was cheap. you could pay a retail worker 8 bucks an hour and rent a storefront for like 2-3 grand amonth. Now the workers get $20/hr and rent is 8-10K a month. So prices get doubled, and companies need to do everything they can to reduce costs by reducing hours to peak-traffic only. a lot of restaurants in my city are now only open from 6-9pm, because they can’t afford to let any table sit empty while they are open. they used to be open 4pm-11pm.
ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS GIVE US ENOUGH TOKYO DRIFT!
that was literally the last straw for me a few months ago… I bought a 4bay hdd enclosure, a cheap 5way switch, and got proxmox then docker then arr stack stood up on an old minipc. every month i look for a cheap hdd or two to add.
do you have any idea how much better 1080 looks when it streams from your basement and not across the country??
