Me v. the Streaming Services Clusterf*ck
One man’s attempt to impose order over an inconsequential part of his life
“It’s quite simple,” I said to my wife and kids over dinner last week. “If you want to watch Amazon Prime, Starz, or AMC+, log into Amazon. To watch Disney+, Hulu, or ESPN+, go directly to those apps but use the Disney credentials. And use Roku if you want to watch Showtime, Paramount+, or AcornTV, whatever that is.”
“That’s my British murder show channel,” my wife explained with a demonic grin. Then she asked, “But What about Apple TV+? There’s a new season of The Morning Show coming out.”
“Well, that’s just Apple TV, which is its own thing like Netflix and HBO Max, er, Max. But for whatever reason, we use your Apple log-in for that one.”
Then my 14-year-old son spoke up, “Speaking of which, Mom, I tried to log in to Apple to watch Atlanta United on MLS Season Pass but I couldn’t get in. Did you change your password?”
“I can’t remember,” she replied. “I’ll look later.”
“Where do we go to watch Peacock?” asked my 12-year-old daughter.
“Nowhere,” I said. “We don’t have Peacock.”
My son immediately piped up, “Uh, yeah we do.”
“We do?” I asked.
“Definitely. I just watched a Premier League match on there the other day.”
My daughter laughed and summed it all up for the table. “Dad is so confused.”
She’s got that right. Dad is confused. And if you’re confused about what, whom, and how much you are paying for streaming services, you are not alone. At some point, the effort to combat this costly chaos is pointless. But, I was just stupid enough to try.
Last week, Hulu sent me an email announcing an increase in our ad-free subscription rate from $14.99 to $18.99 per month. I asked myself, “Wait, don’t we already get Hulu as part of the Disney+ bundle? So 1. why am I paying for it separately, and 2. where the hell did I sign up for it in the first place?” Answer: Roku. I think.
So I went to Roku where I did not see Disney+ but I did see my wife’s English homicide network and a subscription to Paramount+. That’s fine—hey, everybody loves Yellowstone—but I was pretty sure I was already paying for Paramount through AppleTV.
Yet upon logging onto said app, I found no P+ subscription listed. Was I misremembering? I checked my email Trash folder and there I saw receipts for Paramount from Apple every 30 days for the past 10 months. Good, I’m not crazy. But where in the hell do I manage that subscription?
A little further investigation and a lot of frustration revealed that we were paying for Paramount+ not through Apple TV+ but through my wife’s Apple App Store account…along with a subscription for MGM+.
All these + sign channels, distributed through a variety of platforms, add up to one big shit show. It made me nostalgic for simpler times. Cutting the cord has indeed provided consumers with excellent content and the promised flexibility to customize channel subscriptions, but it’s also generated boatloads of confusion. Say what you want about the pricing and forced bundles of old-school cable operators, customers got one easy-to-understand monthly bill from one provider each month.
Today, TV subscriptions are scattered about like trash in the digital ocean. You buy your core, over-the-top “TV” from YouTube, Roku, Sling, Amazon, Hulu, or DirectTV, then add on your preferred mix of premium channel services. But—as far as I can tell—each of the TV platforms provides some but not all of the premia, so you’ve got to cobble together a few here and a few there.
Figuring out who you’re paying for what requires a full team of KPMG forensic accountants. Six bucks here, twelve bucks there – no one charge is a big deal but when you look at the total, it really adds up. This death by 1,000 digital cuts is driving me bonkers!
In the name of sanity, I resolved to streamline everything through as few providers as possible. As a first step, I went to YouTubeTV, where we get our “TV-TV.” And that’s where I found our second Showtime subscription. DAMNIT!
Okay, so I canceled those duplicate Hulu, Paramount, and Showtime subs. That felt good-$32 worth of post-tax money back in my pocket every month. This is totally worth the half-dozen hours of my life I’ve invested in this project so far.
Now back to the Disney networks. If I wasn’t paying via Roku, where had I signed up? I checked our American Express statements going back a year. Apparently, I had purchased ESPN+ a la carte, but there was no record of any Disney transaction. So I went to DisneyPlus.com and clicked on my account settings where they informed me that I could manage my subscription at Verizon.com. What the fuck, Bob Iger?
I do vaguely remember getting that bundle as part of my cell phone service and it’s a nice perk, but is it worth introducing an additional relationship into our home where the four of us have to stay on top of yet another user/PW, recurring charges, consolidations, constantly updated user agreements, etc.?
Of course, this raises the question of how many premium channels we really need. For some of the apps, you know what you’re getting. I consider Netflix a must-buy, same for Max (btw, whose genius idea was it to throw out “HBO,” i.e. the brand that invented premium television?) and I guess you need Acorn TV if you are an Anglophile who likes to watch people die. But $9.99/month for Starz – what the hell is on Starz?
And TV is just one category of subscription in our house. God knows how many times I’m paying for other recurring charges like Xbox GamePass, Xbox Live, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Wondery podcasts, Audible, Scribd, Amazon Prime, Dropbox, Greenlight, Epic books, a couple of Substacks, etc.
It’s a real problem, so of course there are new apps available that help you identify and minimize all the subscriptions you’re paying for. Guess how you pay for this nifty service? That’s right, through a monthly subscription.
So where did things end up in this game of premium channel wack-a-mole? I believe that by canceling and consolidating subs and then pre-paying annually instead of monthly, I carved out maybe $1,200 / year in savings, which ain’t nothing. My fear is that, within a few months, we’ll be right back where we started.
The only bright spot of the whole experience was learning that, for the past nine months, my children have been watching Peacock by logging in onto my brother’s account. Maybe his kids are enjoying British bloodshed on my wife’s Acorn TV.
THE END.
Hey, this week on Crazy Money, I’ve got an excellent interview with economist Melissa Kearney about her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Melissa has studied poverty for 20 years and has testified about inequality in front of Congress, so she’s no right-wing zealot. However, the data are clear that kids raised in a stable home with two parents are more likely to have more stable behavior, attend college, achieve lucrative employment, and get married themselves, thus the pattern repeats on both ends of the economic spectrum. Family structure is a key element to breaking the cycle. Listen now.
Love the spreadsheet Paul! 😀
Great essay. This is comedy because it rings so true. I became so frustrated and confused that I replaced two key credit cards with new account numbers simply to force all of these companies to send me emails telling me that my subscription was going to be cancelled. --- Disney's stock is not doing well. In my opinion, the bullshit Verizon promotion and the bizarre linking to old ESPN fantasy log-ins created a completely bogus story about the adoption of Disney+. The calendar caught up to Disney+ and their subscriptions seem to be in free fall. IMO - the are the poster child for abusing the consumer with streaming services.