My ultimate TV streaming services hack is to cancel everything

By the time you read this, it’s feasible that Netflix will cost you, I dunno, $57bn per month to fuel its AI habit. Amazon Prime will fry your TV if you dare blink during ad breaks that arrive every 11 seconds. And Disney+ will introduce such a gulf between its ad-supported and premium tiers that you’ll only be able to see both ends from space. I’m sick of it. Which is why my ultimate TV streaming services hack is to cancel everything.

Will I actually take my own advice? Probably not. But I have been trimming subscriptions via gleeful prods of ‘cancel’ buttons. And each cancellation makes me remember that it wasn’t always like this. But I’m not pining for the ‘good old days’ before streaming existed. Because, in many ways, they were even worse. 

I’d get home to discover I’d missed an episode of a show I loved, which the BBC or Channel 4 would refuse to repeat before the heat death of the universe. And then we got a dog. He was a lovely boy and is dearly missed. But he did always want to have a wee the second the Doctor Who theme tune kicked in.

Be kind, rewind

Play

As a tech writer, I’d like to say tech came to the rescue. But it didn’t. Not really. Our Toppy (Topfield PVR) – much like TiVo in the US – allowed live TV to go all timey-wimey. You could pause and resume live TV and record entire series with a click. The Toppy was also customisable, making it a cinch to bolt on mini-apps for skipping commercials and messing around with the interface.

The snag? The Toppy hit an awkward mid-point between old and new. It was still reliant on over-the-air broadcasting. It wasn’t quite smart enough to deal with changes to schedules. Which wasn’t fun when you returned from a week away only to discover it had recorded the first half of every episode of your favourite show, glued to the second half of whatever happened to be on beforehand.

Then Netflix’s streaming incarnation arrived. At first, it was the streaming equivalent of a DVD bargain bin, but it quickly transformed into the place where most of what I wanted to watch lived, on demand, for a lowish monthly fee. 

It couldn’t last. Media giants who’d let Netflix play with their toys snatched them back and attempted to copy/paste the business model, fragmenting the TV landscape forever.

It all ads up

Alas, that business model never made the billions required to create enough shiny new shows to attract shiny new subscribers. Which is why streaming TV has since been stuck in a depressingly predictable pattern. Ads arrive, ostensibly to provide ‘even better value’, but the with-ads tier soon ends up costing as much as the ad-free one once did. Meanwhile, ‘premium’ tiers drift ever upwards into eyebrow-raising territory. And the sheer number of services makes it exhausting to track shows you want to watch. 

Some friends deal with this by subscribing to everything, so they can gawp at every new cultural phenomenon before some idiot spoils it online. Others play a deft game of service-switching, paying for one at a time. Which is great until the moment you realise you forgot to cancel one a year back but haven’t used it since.

So year zero really is looking appealing. Get rid of it all. See what I actually miss. And, honestly, I wonder whether the knowledge I’ve been burning through money without actually owning anything will hurl me back into the past after all. Not to the era of broadcast telly again – but perhaps, finally, to shiny plastic discs.

• Now read: Why I’m buying my first CD player in 20 years