Too many services, prices rising well above inflation etc
Does any internet provider/other bundle the popular ones?
My current ones are:
Apple Music Family - £16.99 monthly - mainly used by my daughter, occasionally by me.
Netflix (billed from them, subscribed since 2012) - just gone up to £18.99 for the 4 screen 4k service - in reality we need 4 screens in the house but not at 4k.
Disney+ - £12.99 monthly
Paramount+ - recent increase to £7.99 monthly but the one I personally watch most. Can’t seem to access a cheaper annual plan from Apple Store.
Prime - included so effectively free for the other benefits but I’m not paying them to remove ads.
Crunchyroll - anime and around £5.99 monthly.
Got rid of Sky years ago. Personally I’d be happy just with Paramount+ and Prime. Other family members would vehemently disagree but it all adds up.
Years ago I used to pay most via an iTunes account and pounced on the frequent iTunes Gift Card offers of 15-20% off at supermarkets but these are non-existent these days.
Starting to think that as many things are binge-watched that a hokey-kokey monthly subscription might be the best - used to do this with NowTV for Game of Thrones.
I subscribe to Netflix (shared with my sons), and no other streaming. I have no interest in subscribing to a music service, and decline to subscribe to more than one video service.
I also decline to subscribe to Amazon Prime or any other shopping services, indeed I only buy from Amazon when I can’t find what I want at a reasonable price elsewhere.
But I do subscribe to fibre broadband, and to a mobile phone/data service.
The current new offerings on Prime & Netflix are so awful (formulaic, weak screenplay, repetitive storyline, poor acting) that they should pay the viewers to watch their junk
Are your sons still at home with you on the same IP address (though most would be dynamic I suspect)?
My daughter is likely to go to University later this year, so for funding purposes although technically still living with us for most of the year streaming services like Netflix might want their extra pound of flesh.
Prime works for us due to fairly frequent purchases and next day deliveries of small value items, especially schoolbooks.
No, since last summer. We keep getting prompts to have our own account, but have resisted and managed to continue, though I suspect it won’t be long until we get cut off. (The account is in my older son’s name as he started watching before we did, years ago.)
I moaned to Netflix when they warned me about access from a different IP address a few years ago despite never maxing out the premium 4 seat option. I think it resulted from access at a rented holiday property via an AppleTV.
They stopped sending me any correspondence including the recent price increase. So tempted to cancel.
Recently, my wife and I went through some streaming consolidation. Out with Foxtel, which has a savings of $100 AUD per month, I kept the NBN at $85/month (Foxtel). I subscribed to Kayo for our 4K sports in Oz for $35/month (shared with our son and his mates; unbeknownst to me, they used my email address and I only found out when I went to subscribe and locked them out, though not my bank account or credit card) and took out a BritBox Sub for $10/month. Net savings of $60/month.
We still have the Apple Music family at, I think, $24.99/month, which I used to download music to my iPhone when riding the bike when I had her. Then, I switched to an online radio service via mobile phone, which only cost me a data allowance and no fees. With the bike gone, I use Apple Music to listen to new CDs that I am contemplating purchasing or vinyl, and Shelley uses it to listen to the radio and music through her Home Pod in the kitchen/lounge room. I am still trying to validate an Apple Music subscription, as the adult children left home six years ago.
Thanks Mitch - I use a very small percentage of what the rest of the family use so don’t want to cancel subs as it will remove their choices, but maybe I should downgrade some such as Netflix and let them suffer ads!
It really does all add up, and I’ve not even mentioned the gaming site subscriptions.
Do you actually need all those subscriptions at the same time. I used to have a few, now I tend to stick with one a month, then change to a different one at the end. That gives time for the first one to get their content updated for when you rejoin a month later
If you only need Sky for the sport, then NOW is a cheaper bet. Normal price is around £35 a month, but when I fake-cancelled they offered me 6 months at £20. That’s HD quality, 4K is an extra £4.50 a month. I’m happy with that.
Theres an embedded app on my Sony TV which works seamlessly, but I can also watch on a NOW TV stick upstairs, on my IPad or even on my iPhone in an emergency.
Netflix for films and documentaries (rarely made for TV stuff) and NOW for sport. Agree re the comment above about NOW, it isn’t hard to suggest you want to cancel and find you get offered 3 month deal dropping by a 1/3rd or so.
We won’t give money to Amazon in any way if we can avoid it. Ditto Disney, although I doubt any thing they offer would interest us.
We still watch DVD/Blu Ray on subscription from Cinema Paradiso (formerly Lovefilm). Two disc per month but we will cancel soon as we rarely watch TV in the summer. If you exclude sport I watch an hour or less TV in a week, my wife a bit more but not a lot. We have an ancient and tiny TV!
A niece-in-law, living very remote from us, has shared her Disney account with us. I used it once (or rather 3 times), for peter Jackson’s Beatles Get Back trilogy
No film streaming… read books.
No music streaming…play cds.
I do watch an hours YouTube a night but this becomes so advert heavy it might go. How many face age reducing serums do I need.
I do have a subscription for the Guardian.
Even dumped Prime as I prefer to use small retailers.
Well spotted - potentially or a post in response to a similar query in streaming - the nuanced difference I didn’t explain well, was that I was wondering if there was some kind of aggregator service which bundled several services for a cheaper price.
In essence is there a service whereby bundling services from different providers might save a few pounds off each subscription? It’s not something I’m aware of but thought others might know.
Most of them used to be £5.99 or so monthly but several without adverts are £12.99-£18.99 which is a lot. This was prompted by Netflix increasing prices to £18.99 I suspect.
You can save a bit with annual subscriptions rather than monthly, but I can’t find that option for some anymore, plus the fact that an annual subscription with the ones costing over £10 is a lot to fork out in one go.
Hypothetically speaking, a VPN would allow you to get anything that’s streaming for about $50 a year. It wouldn’t help for sports. Again hypothetically, sharing the VPN with your offspring gets the price down by half. Hypothetically.
