Americans’ New TV Habit: Subscribe. Watch. Cancel. Repeat.

Now replace "movies" with "bodies".

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

I literally did not say any such thing.

I have to ask you to please stop misrepresenting what I've said.

Yes, I did get good deals with yearly subscriptions to streaming services that have enough content for me to justify at $5 a month - it would be tremendously stupid to subscribe to something that doesn't have enough content to justify even that amount, and obviously I did not recommend people pay for something that they aren't going to watch.

I don't see what is hard to understand here.

You're in the MoFo, not the BoFo

I subscribe to the Criterion Channel and have no intention of canceling any time soon. It is not that they have films I want to watch because I can find those anyway. I keep the subscription because CC helps me discover films that wouldn't ordinarily be on my radar. In essence I pay for the curation and their expertise more than the film availability.

I also recently subscribed to a local streaming service called Cinobo for the same reason. Very big collection with a larger focus on more recent European films.

Yep, guilty as charged. All the services are like girls wanting to go out with me, and I choose a different one each month. TONGO a Baller

I also love the CC for all of that - but one reason that I don't see many people mentioning is that it seems to be the last streaming service left that doesn't start pestering viewers as soon as the end credits begin to roll, desperately trying to convince you to click RIGHT THIS MINUTE and start watching something else RIGHT AWAY.

Yes, as far as I know, the CC is the only place left where you can watch the end credits at your leisure, if you want, and no unwanted things pop up immediately on the screen trying to make sure you stay glued to the streamer.

There is absolutely nothing more annoying than this, when it comes to watching stuff on the streamers.

I have now cancelled Shudder after resubscribing on April 18 to watch Late Night with the Devil. I have resubscribed to Prime, mainly because they have three Sydney Sweeney movies that I want to watch.

Do you subscribe to Shudder directly or through the AMC+ package?

I subscribed directly to Shudder.

stupid, there's something called 'DVDs' and 'THE INTERNET ARCHIVE'

That's what you said. I'm only asking questions.

I did this for Disney for Get Back and Apple for The Velvet Underground.


I generally am too lazy to cancel subscriptions, but those streaming services were so unbelievably terrible I had no choice.


Do wish I had watched The Black Hole on Disney before I did the deed though. Oh well. Maybe in another lifetime

I'm thinking of resubscribing to Crave (Canada's equivalent to HBO Max) because I want to watch Anyone But You. It's 9.99/month for the basic ad supported level, but there isn't much else on there that I want to watch, so I'm not sure if it is really subscribing.

I've started to keep a letterboxd list of movies on Netflix service (not a core service for me) that I would actually want to watch or rewatch should I subscribe to them. If the watched list get long enough and I'm in the mood, it's time to subscribe. The rewatch movies determine how long I keep it for.


I should probably do the same for AppleTV+, because they also get the odd movie here and there that isn't streamable without a subscription.


(Off the top of my head for ATV+, it's MacBeth, Wolfwalkers, and Boys State. I guess the new one to add is Girls State).


Criterion, Mubi, and Shudder are the only ones I keep year round and their annual discount is a factor for it (especially for Shudder. Criterion, less so. I think Mubi without the discount would have just been a bit too pricey to keep in addition to everything else). Kino started a streaming channel on Amazon. If I wasn't already over-saturated, I believe I'd probably sign up for that.

One thing I didn't notice in the article was, cable can be notoriously difficult to cancel in the US (or at least, used to be). I think there was a news story that went viral about a decade ago about someone calling customer service at Comcast to cancel their service where they were on the phone for about an hour, and this was by design (lots of holding, transferring, and "what if we give you this deal").


IIRC, the call center employees were heavily incentivized to keep that subscription (or penalized if they didn't), so that's where the whole, "threaten to cancel a service to get a cheap deal on it," strategy some people boasted about came from.


One way for streaming services to get better retention, especially amongst young viewers, bury the instructions for how to cancel a service deep within you page, have the instructions be, "call this number." That alone would become a major barrier for some (me included).

Why not just rent it digitally?

I could, but it's 6.99 to rent digitally, so it is only $3 more to subscribe to Crave for a month.

Shudder isn't very good, but every month, I'd say maybe two or three things might pop up which just about justify it. Plus, there are some standard classics on there I've seen a million times, and probably have a copy of somewhere, that I like to have the easy access too.


Criterion is rock solid. Every month lots of movies, and lots that I want to see or haven't heard of.


Mubi has really pared back their offerings over the last six months to the point that I think anyone who is paying there hefty fee should have a right to complain. There whole thing was a new movie a day and now it's.....sometimes a new movies shows up...sometimes they pretend a movie that was already on their service or that they literally just lost the rights to, is a new offering. It still has loads of things I like, and it's been invaluable for finding modern films I find really interesting, but if it wasn't for the fact that my ex renews my subscription ever year, I would be getting annoyed over how much less they are now giving for the same price.

A couple of services that nobody's mentioning are Hoopla and Kanopy. In many US cities, your local library card gets your free access to everything they have to offer.

This, basically. I don't use a site or anything (and if I was going to, I'd probably just build the functionality into this one), just a text file. It works pretty well, I can tell at a glance if there's a critical mass of stuff where it makes sense to subscribe and binge for a month or two.