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.”
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.
Goes for video games as well:
SkidrowReloaded
Repackslab
Fitgirl Repacks
ElAmigos
SteamUnlocked
Has Netflix tried not going to Starbucks as often, or not eating Avocado Toast?
maybe just give the kid one doll for Christmas?
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.
If you have the processing power to spare (and haven’t done it already), you might be able to re-encode your media files to a more space-efficient codec.
I’ve reduced some of my video files by as much at 75% using Handbrake to convert from AVC to H.264 or H.265. I’m not the most discerning viewer, so I haven’t noticed any difference in video quality, but I’ve definitely noticed the extra space on my drives!
I’ve got an ffmpeg script saved on my Mac which re-encodes video to a fraction of its original size without any apparent loss of quality. Shit’s basically magic.
I have one for audio as well, but I think it’s an Apple-only MP4 codec, that requires you to have to manually build it into ffmpeg on any other platform. But the end result is that my 2 hour radio show AIFFs that start out at 4GB end up being high quality MP4 at around 75mb.
Like I said, magic.
Do you happen to remember where you got it? I’ve got a Mac and while the idea of going through all the media files on my servers to convert them I twitch a little bit, but would also love to cut down space without giving up some of my files
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.
I bought two right before stuff jumped too badly. Looked about a week later thinking buying another one might be an ok idea, rofl no way I can justify it now…
So now I’m debating if I really NEED backups… certainly not of everything… I still need a video card, and those never did really come back down…
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
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.
Same, and I was going to buy more storage but those are getting so expensive too.
I’m holding onto my classics but anything else I delete when I’m done watching it.
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
Can I interest you in some links:
My Home Media Project
The *arr Ecosystem
Media Servers
- Jellyfin
- Jellyseerr (now migrating to seerr)
Infrastructure
Public Domain Content
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.
And don’t forget the old lobbying to push for greater persecution and criminalization of torrents and VPNs
I’ve never really understood the mentality of businesses. They’re losing customers, so they bump the price to compensate, therefore losing more customers.
I guess those that hang on end up making up for those they lose, and because all the other services are doing the same, they end up getting people who’ve jumped ship from another one and signed up at a good introductory cost.
But, like, just charge a bit less and have more customers.
Amazon Prime be taking the Jesus money. Weird recommendations showing up lately.
I remember when Netflix paid someone good money for improving their recommendation algorithm. Now they keep trying to shove live boxing matches in my face no matter how many times I say I’m not interested.
Oh come on, everyone is excited to see current star Minnie Driver play some bible lady
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.
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
It’s not even an economic issue for me. It’s an issue of “why the fuck would I pay for a service and still receive ads?”. These companies just keep getting greedier and offering less. Why should I pay for a worse experience than a pirate streaming site?
I setup a raspberry pi 5 minicomputer box with a small hard drive and Pi OS installed. I then browse to whatever pirate streaming service I want and use Firefox with the adblock installed. Works like a charm.
The RII K06 mini keyboard works very well.
I originally got the system to run tradeshow videos at the booth. It does that very well and is quick and easy to setup.
because of financial concerns
Yeah, I am calling bullshit on that explanation. The services that were enjoyable just a few years ago are now absolutely dog shit. Low quality shows, unexplained cancellations, increased number and length of ads, release schedules meant to keep you on forever, password and location crackdowns, VPN rejections…
It’s become a garbage product, even if people had tons of disposable income they’d think three times before subscribing again.
This is the point I was looking for. I’d happily pay a reasonable price for Netflix, and I did for years. However, I was rewarded for my patronage by massive price hikes combined with a consistently worsening product. The end came when I realized that I didn’t even use it anymore because it sucked so much. If I wanted to pay exorbitant prices to watch ads, I’d go back to cable.
One extra reason I canceled netflix is it felt too judgy, what’s the point of paying for something if you are still the product
FMHY , everthing is free .
If only all the streaming services bundled all the services into one service and started selling it for a better price than whatever’s currently being offered :D
History repeats itself and all that
shows how Americans are getting frustrated over the cost to have their favorite movies and TV shows at the click of a button.
That don’t even last because everything operates on some cycle. And if they’ll even watch them being geolocking is a thing.
HOW DARE THEY!! 😡