Subscription Fatigue (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

I resisted subscriptions for years. It was anathema to me to have a recurring cost on something; I always looked for a way to buy once. Why get a Tivo with monthly service if I can buy a VCR outright? Why have cable when I can buy a TV antenna and be done?

Times change, I've evolved into Modern Man, and I've got the cable bill, and cellphone with data plan bill. And for fun, I subscribe to Audible for monthly audiobooks. Because Modern Man commutes an hour daily.

I did get rid of the TiVo monthly by paying for Lifetime service. That felt good. For a while before that, I used Tivo with OTA HD, but that's not an option at my new place, so I've finally got the mongo digital cable package.

I looked at replacing cable TV and Tivo with Netflix, but FIOS oversubscription / throttling / whatever causes Netflix to be sub-SD during primetime. I canceled my trial Netflix subscription.

And then there are the magazines, the RSS feeds I "subscribe", and Facebook and HTF notifications I'm "subscribed" to.

Subscription fatigue? Not the monthly financial cost. I've chosen that and am ok with it that for now. The fatigue is library fatigue. I've got too much to watch, to read, to play, to listen to. It can start to feel like a chore to get through my backlog of entertainment and get it out of my queue. I did stop buying movies on disc a few years ago, just to get rid of that ever-growing backlog.

 

[britx]

My line of thinking is very easy to understand. I am the one in my family who pays the bills each month and I see the subscriptions as small as they are on their own are starting to add up little by little when you look at them together. The whole point of my original post is that when you add up all of the subscription costs that it gets to be quite a lot for the consumer to handle each month. You can add and or subtract whichever utilities you like but in the end of the day your pocketbook is getting thinner and thinner because of all of the subscriptions. This phenomenon is starting to be shown in the media now as being an issue. By doing a simple Google search you will see that subscription fatigue starting to be discussed.

Oh, I completely agree with you about subscription fatigue. I just don't agree that I should be adding the cost of my internet package to get the "real" cost of my subscriptions, since I maintain internet access regardless.

What I really like about subscriptions is that I can unsubscribe whenever I want without penalty. When the number of services I subscribed to started to increase, I found two things to be true:

1) I was paying more than I wanted to
2) I had so much content available to me (content that I was interested in) that I would never be able to watch enough to make all the subscriptions worthwhile

So, I now subscribe to one or two services at a time, and continue the subscription(s) for a few months. Then I'll drop those subscriptions and subscribe to another service or two. When I'm going through a period where I know I won't have time to watch much, I just drop everything. I really like the flexibility.

 

[Ejanss]

I resisted subscriptions for years. It was anathema to me to have a recurring cost on something; I always looked for a way to buy once. Why get a Tivo with monthly service if I can buy a VCR outright? Why have cable when I can buy a TV antenna and be done?
I did get rid of the TiVo monthly by paying for Lifetime service. That felt good. For a while before that, I used Tivo with OTA HD, but that's not an option at my new place, so I've finally got the mongo digital cable package.

I had the same experience when I saw that I was paying an extra $9 just to rent my modem from Comcast on top of the $29 Internet and $8 basic-channels cable, and found a page where they listed what compatible modems you could buy outright from Best Buy, return the rental and be done with the extra service charge. Just made that replacement, and waiting to reap the monthly rewards.
On top of that, I keep hearing from folks who wonder "why they have to pay so much for WiFi, on top of their subscriptions", since Comcast socks them monthly for that bit of hardware too, and offers a page of compatible hardware available at Staples. (Me, I have a Mac, so running out and getting an Apple Airport was a no-brainer.)

Times change, I've evolved into Modern Man, and I've got the cable bill, and cellphone with data plan bill. And for fun, I subscribe to Audible for monthly audiobooks. Because Modern Man commutes an hour daily.

Homo Sapiens--Modern Thinking Man--knows his specific needs, and how to limit them to the essentials.
I don't commute as much, so I don't depend as much on non-Netflix streaming services (although I'll watch some digital Vudu/DMA copies if they're free), my cellphone only makes calls/texts because I have an iPad for everything else, and if I need an old hundred-year-old-classic High School Lit audiobook, I download it for free from Librivox.org. (They're public-domain anyway.)
As a result, I'm not up on my Nicholas Sparks bestsellers, but I've become a rabid Charles Dickens and Mark Twain fan.

 

[bujaki]

Ejanss,
I don't think you've lost anything by exchanging Sparks for Dickens or Twain. You're probably more sapiens for it.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I'm not a sports fan, but I kinda get the feeling that if sports went online, no one would need cable any more.

That would do it for me. My wife, though, would be tougher to convince.

 

[Towergrove]

Oh, I completely agree with you about subscription fatigue. I just don't agree that I should be adding the cost of my internet package to get the "real" cost of my subscriptions, since I maintain internet access regardless.

But internet access is a monthly subscription as well isnt it? The point of my original post is fatigue from all the subscriptions that we are being asked to pay for and im not just talking about video subs. Software, games, music, digital magazines, internet connection etc. These smaller subs add up to a much larger sum at the end of the day. Its starting to hit many people in the pocketbooks.

 

[DaveF]

But internet access is a monthly subscription as well isnt it? The point of my original post is fatigue from all the subscriptions that we are being asked to pay for and im not just talking about video subs. Software, games, music, digital magazines, internet connection etc. These smaller subs add up to a much larger sum at the end of the day. Its starting to hit many people in the pocketbooks.

The expected monthly "communications" (internet, cable, cellphone) and "media" (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Audible) bills have increased a lot (it seems to me) the past 20 years.

 

[Sam Posten]

For me all of these come down to a CDB: Cost of Doing Business. If you wanna play you gotta pay. Determining which ones to use and value is the hard part, once that decision is made it's just a cost, not an ongoing concern. Re-evaluate from time to time, don't constantly fret or jump to the new thing.

 

[schan1269]

I live in an area of craptastic radio options. Free, or paid, I use Spotify, Iheartradio, slacker and Vtuner(and some station specific apps, like 92.3 out of Bloomington, IN). It all eats data.Hulu Plus and Netflix are the only video streaming I pay for. Starting to get the urge to pay for Amazon Instant. Can't believe the content AIV has...that is nowhere else, not even physical disc. I perused it last weekend...and was shocked.

 

[atfree]

For me all of these come down to a CDB: Cost of Doing Business. If you wanna play you gotta pay. Determining which ones to use and value is the hard part, once that decision is made it's just a cost, not an ongoing concern. Re-evaluate from time to time, don't constantly fret or jump to the new thing.

My thoughts exactly.

About once a year, I look at my Directv package (I have an older, grandfathered package Choice Xtra), which gives me about 250 channels plus StarzEncore) with thoughts of down-sizing. Then I start thinking of all the cooking shows my wife watches on Food Network and the Cooking Channel, the Hallmark movies she loves to watch, the cartoons/kids shows our kids watch, all the classics I love to watch on TCM, all the sports and movies I watch,etc.

There are some channels we might only watch once a week, but I know we'd be frustrated if we went to watch them and they weren't there. Now, I will will agree there a many "wasted" channels for us (pretty much anything above channel 312 thru the 526) plus 99% of the PPV channels, the 800 series channels of music) but the ones we do watch (to us) make up for all the "wasted" stuff.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Cable TV charges you for each TV connected. Won't Roku let you connect to as many sets at the same time as you want as long as they aren't all watching the same service? Not sure how that works because my streaming is just for me.

Your cable company charges you for each TV you have connected? Do you have a box for every TV in your home?I use a CableCARD connected to a PC with Windows Media Center for my "main" display, and then just bought a $5 coaxial splitter at the hardware store to feed the signal to all of the other TVs. You don't get every channel by plugging the coaxial cable right into the TV, but you get a lot of them.

 

[schan1269]

Your cable company charges you for each TV you have connected? Do you have a box for every TV in your home?I use a CableCARD connected to a PC with Windows Media Center for my "main" display, and then just bought a $5 coaxial splitter at the hardware store to feed the signal to all of the other TVs. You don't get every channel by plugging the coaxial cable right into the TV, but you get a lot of them.

Yes, you get charged for every "box".Directv, Dish and cable have always been that way.

 

[Patrick Donahue]

Yes, you get charged for every "box".Directv, Dish and cable have always been that way.

But if you only want basic cable you can connect direct to your TV and not pay for the boxes...

 

[Ejanss]

But if you only want basic cable you can connect direct to your TV and not pay for the boxes...

Nope, Comcast got wind of that and shut THAT down:
Under some new "regulation", they had to reportedly encode their channels, which meant that even though I had just the $8 Basic Channels to get the local-station news, I now had to get a decrypter channel box plugged into my set, for another $2 on the bill....And not plugging my cable directly into the set means I no longer get the local HD network affiliates twenty miles away without having to buy their $99-$150/mo. Digital packages, and getting a lot of reality-show-obsessed cable splinter channels into the bargain.
If I didn't live in a mountain valley, and could have gotten those HD signals over the air (which I now don't get at all outside of Netflix or Blu-ray)--and if I wasn't "forced" to take either TV or phone just to get a cheap deal on basic Internet--that Comcast cable-TV cord would have been cut, chopped, sliced, diced, and julienne-fried so long ago.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Nope, Comcast got wind of that and shut THAT down:
Under some new "regulation", they had to reportedly encode their channels, which meant that even though I had just the $8 Basic Channels to get the local-station news, I now had to get a decrypter channel box plugged into my set, for another $2 on the bill....And not plugging my cable directly into the set means I no longer get the local HD network affiliates twenty miles away without having to buy their $99-$150/mo. Digital packages, and getting a lot of reality-show-obsessed cable splinter channels into the bargain.
If I didn't live in a mountain valley, and could have gotten those HD signals over the air (which I now don't get at all outside of Netflix or Blu-ray)--and if I wasn't "forced" to take either TV or phone just to get a cheap deal on basic Internet--that Comcast cable-TV cord would have been cut, chopped, sliced, diced, and julienne-fried so long ago.

Time-Warner has done the same thing in my area. While I have a DVR, I recently got my 84-year old Mom cable service and even though she's got the barest bones service possible in the Time-Warner universe, she has a decoding box between the incoming cable and her set.

 

[Patrick Donahue]

Time-Warner has done the same thing in my area. While I have a DVR, I recently got my 84-year old Mom cable service and even though she's got the barest bones service possible in the Time-Warner universe, she has a decoding box between the incoming cable and her set.

Damn... that's not something that's happened to me... yet...

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Mike, does your Mom have a digital tuner in her TV? I only ask because I have Time Warner right across the river from you, and I get 30-40 channels digitally on my TV just by plugging in the coaxial cable. There are a bunch of other channels that use switched video that have to go through a tuning adapter, but there are a bunch that I get right from the coaxial cable.

 

[Mike Frezon]

She does--its a 42" flat screen which I had gotten for my father in the last couple years of his life. Great story: He could never see the reason to have anything bigger than the 26" 4:3 CRT set that he had had for years. But once the new set was up and running (and he would watch across the length of his living room--maybe 12-15 feet!) he stopped complaining right away!

I have never tried to directly connect the cable...as the T-W reps insisted the box was necessary.

The bummer is that the box provides an SD signal so the picture looks like crap. When I first got them the set, they had been using OTA signals and they looked beautiful on the new set. But neither one of them could notice any difference and the cable provided a more dependable signal (the rabbit ears were a PITA) and more variety of channels.

 

[NBPk402]

We cut the cord last year to cable... Now we use our OTA HD antenna for local HD, and Amazon Prime for streaming. Our cable bill is a little over $50 a month, and then we have the yearly Amazon Prime bill. I pay for no other programming at all... Although I may pay for HBO when it becomes a streaming channel if the price is right. I have a XBox 360 but since they charge for online I do not utilize that feature... On our PS3 they do not charge for online gaming so I use their feature when I like.

 

[Towergrove]

There is a good article in the October 31, 2014 Entertainment Weekly (page 10) that is title "What Streams May Come". Its a good read. It also indicates that ala Carte subscriptions may not be a good thing when it comes to prices. They say to expect higher internet bills in the future and that "a dim sum cable menu benefits some but similar models in other countries like Canada where they have ala carte have shown that viewers can end up paying more."

For those of you who like sports channels like ESPN they say alone you would pay around $30 month for that channel if it were available separately. This shows just how much of our cable bills go towards sports that you may or may not be watching... interesting.

Also used the new CBS streaming service as an example. "Do you really want to pay $75 dollars a year (at 5.99 a month) to watch 2 Broke Girls".