Recently the news has been full of cable TV companies and streaming companies raising their prices. Recently Spectrum announced a price hike on its TV, phone, and internet services. Now a growing number of streaming services, including Peacock, Shudder, and more, have all announced price hikes.
This has led many cord cutters to start looking at what they are paying for and think about cutting back. In 2019 the average cord cutter paid for 3 to 4 streaming services. During the height of the pandemic, some reports suggested Americans were paying for as many as 6 streaming services as they were stuck at home.
Now it seems Americans are no longer willing to pay for that many services. So we asked our readers if they were planning to cut back the number of streaming services they pay for.
According to the hundreds of readers who took our poll 48% of them plan to cut back on the number of services they paid for. 51% said they would keep what they have, and just 1% said they planned to add more services.
The real winner here seems to be the free ad-supported streaming service. A number of our readers have commented letting us know that they have cut back on the number of streaming services they pay for in exchange for free ad-supported ones.
Other readers told us they are more likely now to rotate streaming services. Pay for one service like Appel TV+ to watch a season of Ted Lasso only to quickly unsubscribe and switch to Paramount+ for a month, for example.
Clearly, Americans seem to have hit their breaking point when it comes to how many services they pay for. AMC and Warner Bros. Discovery both recently reported losing subscribers.
Now the question is how will this all play out? Cord cutting is maturing and increasingly cord cutters are deciding what they want and what they don’t want to pay for. This could result in some streaming services being unable to find enough subscribers to support themselves.