We watch a lot of TV in our house. Well, at least my wife and I. The kids watch almost zero TV, but that’s another story for another day. For my wife and I, TV is one of our things. It’s what we do most evenings and for me in particular, it’s what I do for a lot of my down time. Thankfully in 2024, there are an endless amount of shows and movies to watch. But is it more about quantity than quality? It’s certainly going that way and funny enough, we are starting to pay more for less.
It doesn’t seem like that long ago that it was impossible to keep up with all the latest productions. Then it was becoming annoying that new steamers were popping up and each had their own price for entry. The good shows were spread pretty evenly across all platforms so to not have FOMO, you tried out the free week and in the end, signed up for another service. Sound familiar?
I rememember before the pandemic, I was holding firm on not getting Apple TV Plus and Disney Plus because we were already paying for Netflix, Crave and Prime. But being stuck at home for months made us all throw caution to the wind and I signed up for Apple and Disney.
Fast forward to now and I think we have everything. Starz, Paramount, Fox and all the other usual suspects. The whole time everyone was saying, well it’s cheaper than cable.
Here’s the thing. We still have cable. We like the ease of it. We keep it for sports and news even though we could get those things on other streaming platforms.
But over the last year or so, prices of all these streams have been creeping up, and up, and up. Some predictions say that eventually that will all round off at $20/month.
Oh and that means the return of the one thing we got so used to not having with traditional streaming. ADS. You know, those commericial breaks that happened at the most dramatic parts of the show. Those annoying videos that turned a show into an hour of your life instead of 44 minutes.
Well, those days are pretty much gone and we are almost back to the days of network/cable TV. Everything has ads (unless you pay even more to get rid of them).
These companies now have been told to make money instead of grow subscribers and they are cracking down. No more sharing passwords, differest tiers if you want HD quality and those annoying commericial breaks that you cannot even skip sometimes.
Oh and for those of you who cut out cable to go the cheaper way, how is that going for you now?
Just yesterday I got an email from Amazon explaining how in a month, Prime Video will be going up a few bucks so they can continue creating amazing content bla bla bla. Maybe stop making Lord of the Rings and we can all pay less?
Subscriptions are out of control in most households as you have one for every single thing. Music, photos, TV, coffee, video games…….you name it. You probable signed up for a subscription.
I suggest as we roll into 2024, do an audit of everything that is dinging your credit card once per month. You will be very surprised. Yes, you did sign up for Peleton 2 years ago. Whoops.
Anyways, I am getting off topic a bit.
The point being is, when it comes to TV and how we watch it, we are sliding back to paying a lot more for a lot less. Not only are all these separate services raising prices, I would say that are not actually pumping out more content (well top quality content). I know, there was the writer’s strike and the actors strike and a lot of productions have been pushed to 2025 because of it. But overall, where are the good shows?
I just watched all the preview videos for each streamer for January. They should be paying us not to cancel. There is nothing.
Crave just bombarded us over the holidays to sign up so we can watch Elf and Friends. Why are we jumping to pay for things that are over 20 years old. I want to pay my monthly price to watch the most anticipated shows. Doesn’t it feel like cable on a Saturday afternoon. Rerun city and you can’t even flip.
Then there is the chore of figuring out where anything is. Yellowstone seems to be on four different services, but not everything, so you need to buy 2 if you want to watch it live etc.
How are you finding the streams lately? Have you added more or have you cut down?
I am considering a purge or at least playing the game of hopping on and off as quality shows appear. Like, why do I keep one of these services when they are already saying their flagship shows are not back for another year.
It’s all madness. But I will probably keep on doing what I’m doing because I enjoy TV that much.