It used to be so simple. You paid the cable company and you got your 25 extra channels, or 50, or 75.
We make fun of those days now, but was it really so bad? I mean, besides some of those ridiculous contraptions that sat on top of the TV.
Then satellite came around, and people started putting a satellite dish on the side of their house or up on their roof. Every neighborhood looked like it was part of the SETI program, trying to find little green men.
We thought it was so cool when streaming became available. It was wonky at first, but it got pretty good pretty fast.
And then . . . you needed more than one. And then more than three.
And then new shows came out that were only available on some other streaming service. You turned around one day and discovered you were paying for seven different platforms.
The average price of a cable subscription 40 years ago was just under $12 a month. With all the premium channels, essentially everything you’d ever want, it was around $21.
Have you audited what you’re paying today for all your streaming platforms?
Netflix just announced they’re raising prices again, the second time in 14 months.
They’re not alone. They’re all creeping up.
And by all, that means Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Disney, Apple, ESPN, Amazon Prime, Paramount, Peacock.
If you wanted to go advertising-free on all the biggies, it’ll now run you $150 to $180 a month. That’s in the spring of 2026. If you’re reading this in 2031, you may wish you could get it all for that price.
And some people subscribe to YouTube TV. That by itself went up past 80 bucks a month.
Believe it or not, this is not a rant about the prices. People can charge whatever they want for their product, and we can choose to pay it or not. It’s that simple.
But I’ll tell you what we’re doing in our house right now. We’ve started rotating services.
We cancelled Netflix and a few others. We kept only four streaming services. And we’re watching the shows on those platforms that appeal to us.
In three months or so, we’ll shut those down and go back to some of the platforms we’d cancelled. We’ll check out their options, watch the ones we like, then cancel again.
Plus, the weather’s getting nice, and I know we won’t be spending as much time watching television anyway. But this rotation of streaming platforms has already sliced our monthly TV bill in half, which, over the course of a year, is serious moolah.
We’ve been doing it this way for over a month, and we haven’t missed a single thing. If there’s something on Netflix we want to see, it’ll probably still be there in four or five months. If not, meh. There will always be something on BritBox that we like. Undoubtedly better, too.
Think about it. Maybe this is a money-saving strategy you could implement, too. Might make up for the soaring gasoline prices at the moment.
Might save you a few hours of sitting on your butt, too, and that can only help.
All that choice wasn’t just going to cost more money—it was costing more attention. More time scrolling. More time deciding.
More time wondering if there’s something better one app over.
We used to flip through channels. Now we flip through subscriptions.
So for us, the rotation isn’t merely about saving money, although that’s a pleasant bonus. It’s really about taking back a little control. Watching what we actually want to watch, instead of grazing endlessly at a buffet that never closes.
Because somewhere along the way, “more options” gradually became “more noise.”
And it turns out, a little less of it feels a lot like freedom.
Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and no longer needs seven apps to not find something to watch.
Find his work at DomTestaBooks.com.
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