About 40 percent of Americans have cut back on streaming services in the last three months because of financial concerns, according to a recent report

About 40% of Americans have cut back on streaming services in the last three months because of financial concerns, according to a recent report

Americans are quitting subscription streaming services in droves as the cost of living continues to climb, a recent report has found.

Streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu have become increasingly popular in recent years, but Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends report, released late last month, shows how Americans are getting frustrated over the cost to have their favorite movies and TV shows at the click of a button.

“As the cost of everyday essentials like food and housing remain high, many consumers are reevaluating their budgets and cutting back on nonessential expenditures,” Deloitte said in its survey results. “At the same time, prices for media and entertainment services continue to climb.”

  • mlgEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    I had to resort to used SAS drives on my server.

    You can get them pretty cheap, but you absolutely have to run a full smart test and check the error correction log before using.

    Plus they usually come with 5 years power on time minimum, so you’d only want to run them in any RAID/ZRAID combo that has redundancy.

    Couple of people here mentioned re-encoding, but that also harms the seed count if you’re using BitTorrent as the exchange medium.

    Part of the issue is that Bluray remux rips are usually in H.265 at 10 bit with Dolby Vision which pushes 4K file size into the 70-100Gb range.

    That’s fine for a single movie on a bluray disk, but its atrocious for saving multiple onto a drive or NAS.

    But then most encodes still almost all use H.265 or H.264 which still gives you a fat 30Gb file for 4K.

    I’m pretty sure AV1 solves this issue because it has much better compression compared to H.265, especially for higher pixel content, but no Blurays are using AV1 because there’s no reduced cost in forcing a change in consumer hardware.

    Plus I think AV1 technically doesn’t support Dolby Vision in proper yet.

    • Tarambor
      11·
      2 days ago

      But then most encodes still almost all use H.265 or H.264 which still gives you a fat 30Gb file for 4K.

      So you can store over 500 films on a 2TB HDD. I’m failing to see the issue.