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Comment by jwrallie | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone has experience with cancelling and switching services periodically so that you can access all the content, but not at the same time?

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We cancel each service as soon as we subscribe (easy through Apple subscriptions.

Most of the time we don’t even realise the month has passed and the service has cancelled until we want to watch something on the service, then it takes 15 seconds to resubscribe.

Apple has changed the game in so many ways. This is definitely one of them.

Were any of the services hard to cancel before Apple? I didn't think so. Maybe Amazon Prime (which is more than just a streaming service). For the rest, I don't recall any dark patterns or required phone calls to some sort of "retention specialist". Just go to the website and click cancel. If anything, it was Netflix that led the way on this, and set the example that the others followed. Am I missing something?

A single pane into subscriptions that you can end, or later re-start, with a click or two.

It’s not only the ease of subscribing, or canceling, but the ease of seeing all of your subscriptions and managing them all without doing any work to set up that view.

This is very interesting, so basically from 30 days in it is free until you decide to watch something, so even if you subscribe every time to the same service you can squeeze one or two days for free once in a while.

I don't but know folks who do. They keep track of things they want to watch until they get to the point where subscribing for a month makes sense then cancel at the end of the month.

The hard part is keeping track of what you want to watch and what service it's on and whether it's still there when you want to watch.

justwatch.com helps a lot with this. For each show, it tells you in which steaming service it is available. You can also track and wishlist everything.

I use Reelgood app/site for this.

That sounds like a lot of work.

I just subscribe every few months to each platform and see what they have new.

This works, but you're quickly getting into more effort than piracy. Valve figured this stuff out many years ago.

This is basically incompatible (or at least really difficult) with password sharing, but then the streaming companies are trying to erode that bit of their moat.

I do this. I don't watch enough that it makes sense to have multiple subscriptions at the same time. The default is subscribed to nothing, then if I hear about something I want to see I'll subscribe to that for a while.

I do have Amazon Prime though, so some of the subscriptions are to channels on that. I'll drop it for sure when they put ads on everything.

I do this. Don’t track as closely as I should, but do periodically subscribe/unsubscribe from HBO, Peacock, and Netflix.

I managed to get my Netflix entire account deleted with all of my bookmarks on where I stopped watching what because I haven't re-subscribed for a while. I suspect they have some kind of grace period before your data gets purged. If you hit it you will have to create account anew and it will be completely blank new.

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