Are the streamers runnign out of st(r)eam?

[Frank Angel]

One hundred dollars per month for Dish plus another $130/6-mo and another $100+ a month...a total of $200-$250/mo. ... would DEVASTATE my budget!

I mothballed my car and my GF

Um ..that's where my eye paused and I thought, Wow...mothballing his girlfriend...yah, no doubt; that will indeed save him lots of $$. Sorry, Randy; it's my mind's fault.

Steve, a few of my friends and I have discussed the problem and find that for us it is just the opposite about short series; we LOOK for them. We've been burned more than once with long, 4 and 5 season runs. We all find ourselves actually choosing series that claim to be "limited series," over series with 3, 4 even 5 seasons. Those series with extended season, many times are running on their popularity and money generating grosses, not particularly on the very content and style that make them compelling in the first one or two seasons. Much like most entertainment, if is making money, make more of it and that just means more of the same. We found that series with longevity often run out of sustainable ideas long before the producers realize they should have ended it 20 episodes ago. A number of times WE just quit before the producers do. Give me a good series that runs two, even one season and if they know they've created a robust story and a compelling way of telling it, then they should know when and how to bring it to a satisfying conclusion; I am happy with that; I don't need them to give me more of the same just because I was a loyal fan in the beginning. Problem is, they don't seem to know when that point has come come. So we wind up with serie that follow much the same path as the movie equivalent of a "franchise," i.e., a never ending string of junk episodes. It's like, would you want POWER OF THE DOG or CODA to go on for another 15 hours? There is something to be said for economy of ideas.

[Van Dalton]

All the above, and the market has just gotten so fragmented with all the studios, at least one online retailler and even a search engine hosting their own streaming operations. Back when it was just big, monolithic Netflicks and HULU, it was simple and everybody was happy. Two systems that carried just about everything from everybody.

Remember what happened to video games circa 1983 (and again with CD-ROM consoles in the mid-90s)? An oversaturated market led to the industry's collapse. The streaming bubble has finally popped. Watch for a lot of them to start going bankrupt and closing down over the next couple of years.

[Randy Stankey]

One hundred dollars per month for Dish plus another $130/6-mo and another $100+ a month...a total of $200-$250/mo. ... would DEVASTATE my budget!

I mothballed my car and my GF and I share her car just to save on gas, insurance, repairs, etc. I'm actually considering getting rid of my car.
Even with the $200/mo. savings on gas, not including other costs, we're just scraping by.

Adding all these costs together, cutting out cable/Dish, iPhone, car, etc., would be like getting another paycheck every month!
How the HELL do people even survive?!

We have a Netfix account and one on Hulu but we don't pay monthly. We use gift cards. When one runs out, we switch to the other.
Since the two companies compete on content, they usually show the same or similar stuff so it doesn't make sense to have live accounts with both at the same time. By the time our gift cards cycle through, the content has updated and we can start over again. It's a waste to see the same junk, over and over, every month.

I would never consider subscribing to Disney, Paramount or whatever streaming they have, today. Not even for 0.68 seconds.

I can't imagine how other people think it's a good idea to pay multiple-hundreds of dollars per month to see stupid crap on television, most of which they don't even watch in the first place?

Bottom line: It's just DUMB!

[Bobby Henderson]

Price inflation on essentials (food, housing, fuel, utilities, etc) has to be a factor in this downturn with streaming. When a household is forced to make budget cuts "entertainment" is definitely low hanging fruit in the choice of which things to cut.

There has been significant price inflation in recent years with traditional cable/satellite TV service. Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have hiked their prices. If someone is subscribing to multiple services those price hikes start making the overall cost accumulate to something pretty big.

Earlier this week I called Sirius|XM to cancel the service I have in my pickup truck. Their 6 month price went from $123.76 to $131.04. It was $116.47 a couple years ago. They talked me into not cancelling by dropping the price to $46.57. I'll probably still get rid of it in October. Along with that, I'm very tempted to cancel my Dish network subscription. I don't have any premium packages, just the standard "top 120" channel package. It's costing over $110 a month now. If it wasn't for live sports I would have cancelled it years ago. I have subscriptions to Netflix, Prime Video and HBO Max. Between work, working out at the gym 1-2 hours in the evening and having to do other chores that doesn't leave a lot of time for watching TV. It would be a waste of money for me to add Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+ or anything else to that mix.

Have the movie companies discarded theatrical revenue for streaming revenue that's not as reliable and is apparently now going away to at least some degree?

I can't make any sense of the money making strategy of movie studios and their parent companies. The theatrical release window is now very minimal. Not much time passes between when a movie goes from the theatrical platform to digital download, to DVD/Blu-ray/UHD, to streaming services and then finally cable TV. The physical disc products are mostly bare bones affairs these days; they're not feature-packed like they were 20 years ago. So why spend a bunch of money on them?

Overall it seems like the movie studios and their parent companies are doing a good job of letting the different release platforms cannibalize the business of each other.

[Leo Enticknap]

I'm sure Disney will continue to get the families with kids.

I'm not interested in mine seeing the increasingly sexualized stuff they're putting out (at least, not for at least another decade, at which point it will be their choice rather than mine), which is part of the reason why we won't be subscribing to Disney+ in my household; and I suspect that the number of families with kids making the same decision is high enough to form a significant headwind for Disney now.

But totally agreed on the other stuff. There have been one off shows made by the streamers in the last couple of years that I'd have been interested in seeing and would have been willing to make a one-off micropurchase of (e.g. the Netflix documentary on Jimmy Savile), but not interested enough to subscribe to the entire service. Plus, inflation has whacked household income, and streaming subscriptions are discretionary expenses that will be among the first to be cut when income is squeezed.

I suspect that the big streamers will eventually move to a model whereby consumers can subscribe to one, and micro-pay for individual shows made by the others through it. To a limited extent Amazon Prime Video already does this. Netflix, Hulu, etc. will eventually hit a growth ceiling if they continue to refuse to allow this, and possibly have already.

[Steve Guttag]

I think people are quite tired of having a bunch of monthly fees that add up to a big monthly budget. The exchanged their large cable/Fiber bill for a large collection of smaller ones. I'm sure Disney will continue to get the families with kids. But other streaming services that have one or two series of interest may not be enough to have people pay monthly too. Also remember, most streaming series consider but a handful to a dozen episodes a "season." So, in 1-3 months, its over, and no guarantees of a next season (a year away). Netflix is notorious for 1-3 season shows...so it is hard to get invested in them.

[Frank Cox]

So.. Netflix lost subscribers and a big chunk of its stock value. CNN+ shut down just one month after it start date. Disney stocks are down due to slow growth in Disney+ subscriber numbers. Paramount+ also down.

Have the movie companies discarded theatrical revenue for streaming revenue that's not as reliable and is apparently now going away to at least some degree?