Prices up, subscriptions down

The trend over the last 2-3 years of price increases continues to hit streamers. Recently, YouTube TV, Hulu+Live TV, Fubo, and DirecTV Stream (now just DirecTV) have gone up in price. The cheapest of these is $65/month, which a few years ago was the highest price.

With these increases, there is the chance of people canceling subscriptions. I don't think that will be a wide-spread thing, though.

You see, none of those services are really necessary. New streamers are used to cable TV, and are looking for streaming versions of cable TV. That's what these services are.

Long-time streamers figured out a while back that these services aren't needed. There is plenty of content available for much cheaper, if you're willing to plan things out.

Most people don't want that. They want the same thing they had. Some large company spoon-feeding them content, making it easy to consume the content, and paying large sums of money for that convenience.

To me, saving money is convenient. So I rarely use these live streaming services. I will subscribe to Sling TV when college football kicks off, because that's how I can get ESPN. As soon as ESPN launches a stand alone service, though, I'll be going that route.

An antenna is the way to get live local channels. Most people can pick up major broadcast networks with an antenna, and that's cheap. Free is really cheap.

There are people that can't pick up content with an antenna. Paramount Plus gets live local CBS for $10/month. Peacock TV gets live local NBC for $10/month. Fox and ABC aren't available except through an expense live streaming service.

There are many free ad-supported television (FAST) services -- Pluto TV, Tubi, Xumo Play, Roku Channel, etc. -- that offer much of the same types of content, and in a few cases, the same actual content, as the pay services. And there are commercials on the pay services.

To me, it's either pay and watch commercial-laden content, or freely watch commercial-laden content. I'm gonna save me some money! My Streaming Life doesn't cost a lot, and I enjoy it. No, it's not the same as watching cable, but to me, that's the whole point.