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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

No, but we are at the point where we are going to start cancelling subscriptions. There is more content than we will ever watch. First of the chopping block is Netflix, there just isn't enough really good content to justify it anymore. What we are considering is subscribing for maybe 1-2 months a year, bundle the things we want to see on it then.

From our perspective the two most valuable subscriptions are AppleTV+ and Disney Plus. Apple are making by far the best "prestige" TV, and that seems to be their strategy. Quality over quantity, much like their other product ranges.

My wife and I watch slightly less on Disney, but the value it brings us as a family (8yo + 4yo) is enormous. If we could only have one subscription it would be that one.

Amazon Prime Video is just a value add on a subscription we have anyway, although we increasingly shop less on Amazon, without the free shipping we probably would cancel the video subscription.

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I agree with everything you wrote. We keep Disney+ because their family content is untouchable by anyone else. HBO/Apple we trade off every couple of months depending on what's new and what we are most interested in.

Netflix I subscribe to for about 1 month per year to binge the latest of whatever I'm watching (this year: Stranger Things, The Crown) and then cancel. Anything else (Hulu, etc) is a 1 month and churn kind of situation.

Netflix especially seems to be in a content death spiral of sorts. They cancel their original content so aggressively and often in such unsatisfying ways for the audience that I've decided I don't want to watch anything on Netflix until after it is an established success with multiple seasons produced. I wish they would put more wood behind fewer arrows. Or maybe just make a move toward miniseries so at least the audience can have a satisfying beginning, middle, and end to something they've invested time in watching. I would so much rather have 5-8 episodes that form a cohesive story, than a Season 1 that sets up a world and then never gets to go anywhere because some algorithm decided the show wasn't successful enough to continue.

I agree that the cancelations are terrible. In the short term, the viewers get pissed and cancel, in the long term, you get a catalog of incomplete works.

I have great respect for HBO: The Leftovers is a great show but wasn't doing well. They threw the director a bone and gave him an extra season, the 3rd and final, to wrap things up. And what a memorable season it was! So glad they did it!

On the other hand, they canceled Westworld, but that's been dragging on its feet for too long. So that's on the directors.

Apple TV was my first attempt at trying a streaming service outright (instead of a bundled service like Amazon video or using a friend's parent's account they signed into once on my TV)

The experience is awful. They have a similar experience as Amazon video where they pretend to have a lot of content and when you find something you want to watch they throw up a pay gate. If you have to do research online ahead of time to figure out which shows are on the service you can spend that same time finding it elsewhere.

There's also plenty of annoying quirks with the UI like assumptions that you only watch a show on your account and never anywhere else so navigating to seasons is a pain.

The original shows are pretty good (they seem to have a weird Disney+ aversion to any nudity but violence is fine) but it was an easy choice to cancel before any free trial periods ended.

> What we are considering is subscribing for maybe 1-2 months a year, bundle the things we want to see on it then.

Do you see them stopping that ability at some point, and requiring a yearly subscription? I remember the cable companies wouldn't let you start and stop premium channels each month. You'd have to sign up for at least a year.

If they did, at the current rate of content we would then just cancel.

Maybe a pay per series could work, but then that's them admitting that they don't make enough good content to justify a subscription.

> without the free shipping we probably would cancel the video subscription.

Amazon has never made sense to me. Living in Toronto the regular free shipping usually arrives in 1-2 days anyways. Is this wildly different in other cities? My partner pays for prime and I usually just order on my account anyways since there is little difference. Even if there is I rarely need something urgently.

Prime is free shipping _both ways._ Non-prime returns cost money. [1]

That makes buying much more risk-free. I haven't paid for return shipping on an Amazon purchase for years.

I don't know that I return enough to compensate for the ~$120 annual cost (I guess it's going up to $140?), but it does get me faster (and more to the point, deterministic) shipping as well, _and_ the other benefits like Prime Video.

Overall I find it still makes sense. But you do you.

BTW, your partner can probably share the Prime shipping benefit with you, if they aren't already sharing it with someone else, and if you live together. My wife can buy things on Prime with our one subscription.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html%3FnodeI...

Hmm, I've definitely returned defective items before and never been charged shipping. I wonder if that has changed or if it doesn't apply to defective items. (The help page for amazon.ca for "Defective Item?" fails)

I've bought items that weren't defective, but that turned out to not work as well as was advertised, and that's also free.

I don't know the full policy, but it makes sense they would cover the returns of an item that items that are DOA.

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