The subscription model is winning.
The moment my neighborhood got broadband fiber-optic internet, I opted in and had it connected to the house. It was $76.99 a month. I then added YouTube TV at the crazy cost of $64.99 a month. Comcast had been charging me well over $200 for a cable package and internet, so the financials checked out.
I was paying $20 a month for Netflix, which seemed reasonable. Fast forward to today, and I’m paying a lot more for Netflix and the other streaming services I can’t live without, plus all the other subscription services I need for music, audiobooks, podcasts, passwords, cloud storage, writing, editing, reading, and, now, large language models.
For just my audio and video services, I’m paying way more than $200 a month. It’s gotten a little out of hand.
What I keep getting stuck on is that I canceled cable to escape exactly this predicament. In the 2010s, the problem was that the bundle was the enemy. Bundles forced you to pay for what you didn’t want. The future was à la carte. The future was choice. The post-Tivo/DVR world let me watch a show whenever I wanted to. Scheduled air times and network lineups were a thing of the past.
Not counting my internet provider, I have eleven different bundles now. Sigh.
