If you’re the type who must watch the latest drama series, movie, anything, you more than likely maintain an array of subscription services to do so, or at the very least, know someone who does. Here’s Netflix, there’s Amazon Prime, over yonder is Disney+ (Disney+ Hotstar in some regions), and so on. What about your Spotify, Apple services, and whatever other recurring payments you have that aren’t your utilities?
Sure, maybe USD$5 a month doesn’t seem much. You don’t even have to subscribe to all of them at once. However, the prices for these services don’t always stay static. Netflix Premium used to be USD$12 in 2013, and USD$22.99 in 2023, for example. If you were subscribed to even one other service with a similar price increase, you would be paying an extra USD$263.76 annually compared to 10 years prior.
Would the answer then be account sharing so that it doesn’t fall to any one individual who desires to upkeep these accounts? Once again using Netflix as an example, the fine print for the paid plans include a clause saying “only people who live with you may use your account”.
Still, a question does remain: how many of these subscription services do you realistically need? Perhaps a better question might be, does everything need to be a subscription service? Is a monopoly somehow better for the consumer in this aspect in that they ‘shouldn’t’ need to consider one service over another? Most importantly, if you’re going to be launching a subscription service, maybe not have it region-locked.
