Streaming Services

The cost of almost everything is going up, this is no secret. My wife tells me all the time of the latest gas prices and encourages us to use our electric cars as much as possible to save some money.

One way that we try to save is by using streaming services instead of a paid cable subscription. When we started, Netflix was only ~$10/per month. Soon it will be nearly double that rate.

Another issue is that nearly "everyone" has their streaming service now. A whole mess of good shows and movies used to live on Netflix. Once all the other entertainment providers saw how successful Netflix was/is, they all started opening up shop with their streaming services, rescinding the licensing given to Netflix, opting to host their content on their streaming platforms.

The biggest one I can remember leaving Netflix was The Office. This joy of a show was always available on Netflix until it got pulled and caused a disturbance in the force. My brother was bothered by this. He used to watch The Office all the time, he probably watched the entire series at least five times on Netflix alone.

Anywho, now if you want to catch all of the best shows that every network has to offer, you need to subscribe to each of their streaming platforms. Once you subscribe to them all, your total ends up being about the same as you would have paid for cable.

There are a few big differences between cable and streaming, even though the grand totals end up being comparable. You have to manage logins and payments for each streaming platform where the cable is a one-stop-shop. However, streaming services offer their entire libraries on demand, whereas a cable plan will only stream the content on a set schedule.

But with cable, you will never escape the advertisements without paying for DVR and manually fast-forwarding through a pre-recorded show. At least with most streaming services, they have an Ad-free option where you pay a bit more to never see ads. I pay for the premium YouTube because I can afford it and I hate ads.