Note: this is part of a series of articles about television today. It has included information about how, depending on where you live, you may be able to get dozens of television channels—including the major networks—free “over the air” using an old-fashioned antenna. A second article discusses streaming and the real-world requirements for bandwidth to support streaming (Spoiler alert: You don’t need gigabyte speed; modest bit rates will do just fine). This article focuses on one simple tool you can use to take control of your streaming services.
I’ve been a “cord cutter”—the term used for people who have dropped cable television service—for a couple of decades now. I had one big complaint about cable TV: It was too darn expensive.
What exactly is the point of having hundreds of channels to choose from when you only watch one at a time? Did I really care about access to the Home Shopping Network? Maybe I’m a snob, but when I had occasional access to cable—in hotels while traveling for example—it didn’t seem like a very big deal to me.
I was an early subscriber to Netflix, back when it was sending DVDs in the mail. That, I thought, was a great service. It gave me access to as much entertainment content as I wanted. If I could get access to the major networks, that was plenty for me. By 2010, then the transition from analog to digital television was mandated and I had a television with a digital tuner, I had everything I needed.
The Streaming Revolution
When Netflix introduced its streaming service, I was skeptical. I was not an early adopter. By the time I got on board with streaming, Amazon had launched its Prime streaming. And the big migration from cable to streaming had begun.
And as soon as the transition began, and people began subscribing to one service for one show, another streaming service for sports, and a third to get some hot new program, the cost of streaming services began escalating. I would read articles about cord-cutting in which the reporter would say that the cost of peoples subscriptions was getting close to the cost of their old cable service.
Streaming is insidious that way. You subscribe to a service, watch a few shows and then maybe get into a show on anther service and ignore that first stream.
A Magic App for the Future
Here’s an idea for a phone app that I offer, free of charge, to the universe of app developers. Give me an app that I can use to manage all my streaming services. It will track them all, tell me which ones are active, manage passwords for me, and monitor how much I actually use them. It will send me reminders for when services are going to auto-renew (they all auto renew, don’t they?) and I might even be able to use this wonderful app to schedule unsubscriptions in advance. So, if I subscribe to Paramount to watch Picard, for example, it will automatically unsubscribe after the month or two that I might need to watch all the episodes.
I’ll be able to open the app, check the dashboard, and see how much any service I’m paying for is being used, and unsubscribe if it’s getting little or no use.
The app developer might be able to offer it for free if it provided useful data to streaming companies like Nielsen. Users might pay a modest fee for the app if they wanted it with no data sharing.
So, a streaming service control app—that would be of interest to me.
A Simpler Solution: Available Now
In the meantime, I have a recommendation for anyone who uses streaming services and wants to keep track of their use and costs. Get yourself a new credit card, and use it for all your subscription services.
I came up with this idea when I discovered, looking at my primary credit card statement, that I had been accidentally paying for a service for three months that I wasn’t using at all. I had subscribed in order to watch Premier League soccer. The service was clunky and unsatisfactory. I gave it up after a while, but I forgot to unsubscribe.
I check my credit card statements before I pay them, but I missed that one for several months. Never again, I told myself, and I started looking for a new, different credit card to use for subscriptions only.
I’m using it for streaming subscriptions. I also have put my newspaper subscriptions on it, and my “supporter” contributions to public radio, a couple of podcasts, and some online reporting services.
When the statement comes, I have an easy way to review all my “subscriptions” and consider keeping them in place.
I’d really like the idea of that super-duper streaming service control app. But in the meantime, the new credit card is doing a good job helping me keep the costs of streaming under control.
I’m not alone in my unsubscription obsession. Here’s a story from The New York Times about “nomadic” streaming subscribers.
Anon.
Ridge