Business Stream Fatigue? Americans Spent 23% Less on Streaming Services in 2024, Study Finds - The average U.S. citizen spent $42.38 per month on streaming services in 2024, down from $55.04 per month a year ago

https://www.thewrap.com/americans-spent-23-percent-less-on-streaming-services-in-2024

In 2024, the average American grew tired of dedicating so much of their budget to streaming, according to one survey.

The average U.S. citizen spent $42.38 on streaming services each month — which comes out to $508.56 over the course of a full year — according to a December report from Reviews, an internet, streaming, and mobile-focused research organization.

That represents a 23% decline from last year, when Reviews found the average American spent $55.o4 each month on services like Netflix, Disney+, and Max. Reviews’ 2024 report is based on a survey of 1,000 Americans.

What’s behind the big drop in streaming spending?

One reason, according to the report, is that 27.8% of Americans are experiencing “streaming fatigue,” which Reviews defines as “that exact feeling of being overwhelmed with the increasing number of streaming apps.” The report did not say how many of those SVOD-weary citizens ultimately ditched a subscription or two based on their fatigue.



Another potential reason Americans spent less on streaming this year is because many of them are spending more on cable and satellite. The average American spent $89.29 per month — or more than $1,000 per year — on cable/satellite in 2024, up 11% from last year. Nearly 55% of Americans have a cable or satellite subscription, according to Reviews; it is not much of a stretch to believe many of them dropped a streaming service to offset rising TV costs.

A few other takeaways from the report, which you can also see in the graphic above:

The average American has two streaming services and watches nearly four hours of content each day.

And 26.53% of Americans share at least one streaming subscription with their friends or extended family.

The decline in streaming spending comes as ad-supported streaming hit a record high in 2024. A record 43% of streaming subscriptions were ad-supported by the end of Q3, according to Antenna, a market research firm. And between July and September, 56% of new streaming subscriptions were ad-supported — indicating Americans are opting for the cheaper option, even if they have to sit through a few commercials.

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Alternatively, it looks like normies are already getting tired of having to pay for too many apps, for the same "goyslop of the month" series. It's like the old timey "paid channels" from cable TV, back in the '90s.

Either way, it's time to set sail to the high seas.

 

[Miriam Margoyles]

Maybe this is just me, but I am convinced that the way these streaming platforms are set up encourages you to spend hours searching for something to watch and adding stuff to your watch list, but not actually ever getting around to watching any of it.

I had Disney+ for a while, but got rid of it, because I found I actually watched it very little, and nine times out of ten, couldn't be bothered with what was on offer anyway.

I got into a weird situation where I found myself thinking, "Do I watch this hour long episode of a TV show that I'm, if I'm honest, not terribly invested in, or do I go onto YouTube and watch some nerd talk about a game I haven't ever played for two hours?"

And more often than not, choosing the spergy YouTube essay.

 

[neger psykolog]

Tired of paying? Nah nigga I'm tired of watching.

There's way too much slop and anything half interested gets railroaded or cancelled.

Same here. My Steam account is convenient enough to keep me buying vidya every once in a while... Steam flash sales used to be better, 5+ years ago.

But also,

View attachment 6811337

https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesagencycouncil/2023/11/17/the-gaming-industry-a-behemoth-with-unprecedented-global-reach

The vidya industry is much, much larger than Kikewood. Them shooting themselves in the foot by pushing out "goyslop of the month" that normies are rejecting, only exacerbates the problem.

"Gaming industry" in this context likely includes smartphone gacha highly addictive games. I believe if you exclude that shit (which I think people should) them the actual gaming industry is quite smaller.

AFAIK just the "shitty addictive gacha smartphone game" industry is bigger than music, video and normal gaming combined just to give you an idea of how fucking retarded smartphone games are.

 

[Toy Soldier]

With 20% inflation in the US over the past four years, people have way less buying power.

20%?! Bitch, I wish! Depending on what we're talking about it's anywhere from 75% to 300%!

 

[George Lucas]

I think sports is a factor here. The transition of sports from cable to streaming has been a failure so far. It doesn’t help that the streamers shit the bed with the server buffering hell experience. Most people still have shit internet as well and can’t actually stream live content reliably (while they blame the service). Even the most basic cable package will offer a better sports lineup than what you can get with a mix of streamers attempting to do sports, and only the crappy games get streamed because the leagues are terrified of risk.

 

[Haramburger]

I want random episode shuffle, and playback to not pause and ask "are you still there?" after only one hour. 24 hours, sure, cut bandwidth, but let me fall asleep to noise, I want it.

 

[TowinKarz]

The moronic masses are finally staring to realize that they gave up cable for 10 different mini cable services, at probably close to twice the price.. at least. Only paying for what you watch indeed. lol

More like the cable companies and streamers were the morons.

If they'd have adopted an a la carte model where you could pick and choose what you wanted and pay for that only? Instead of being forced to buy bundles that deliberately ensured the top channels were never all in the same one? They could've probably weathered the cord cutting.

And on the flip side? The streamers deployed before they had enough content and vastly underestimated their appeal, leading to having to up costs on those who came aboard with higher fees and ads when they promised none.

The masses weren't dumb, just the companies serving them who somehow failed to think more than 5 minutes ahead in their haste to make line go up.

With a little more forethought? Cable could've survived.

With a little more planning? Streaming could've been like late 90's internet - a service that existed in tandem with it's "traditional" analogue and had uniquely different products that didn't cannibalize each other.

But, here we are.

I think it's funny that the current state of the industry is exactly how they've always wanted it. Since the 80's, they all bemoaned the fact that consumers were "ripping them off" for their games and movies, stridently believing that we had no right or even expectation to own a copy of "their" stuff - and that we were freeloaders. Well, once the tech ripened enough to do away with physical media? They did dances is the street.

Finally, FINALLY the industry would be "perfect" and exactly the way it should be...... you pay for access to THEIR goods.

Just how God intended.


And it collapsed.


Because nobody wants to invest in "access" that can be denied in 50 different ways, with "not enough watch to justify the server space" being only one and the most justifiable. The other 49 ways to cut off your access or restrict it? Are 49 flavors of woke politics and censorship.

 

[Party Hat Wurmple]

I think sports is a factor here. The transition of sports from cable to streaming has been a failure so far. It doesn’t help that the streamers shit the bed with the server buffering hell experience. Most people still have shit internet as well and can’t actually stream live content reliably (while they blame the service). Even the most basic cable package will offer a better sports lineup than what you can get with a mix of streamers attempting to so sports, and only the crappy games get streamed because the leagues are terrified of risk.

What makes me livid is that these streaming services are getting too big for shoes. These faggots are buying exclusive service rights to major events and they simply don't have the hardware to handle them. They always freeze. The Tyson fight was a fucking mess. The servers couldn't handle it. They bounced between qualities and barely kept the stream afloat. This year, Netflix bought the exclusive rights to NFL, same shit. Questionable quality, freezing during the end, and while it wasn't as bad Tyson, I'd rather just cast my tablet/phone on the NFL app.

Hell, I was at a New Year's Eve party and they had the event on stream. It froze during the fucking countdown. Streaming cannot even handle the most basic of basic garbage.

 

[mlanguishi]

I watched the Tyson fight (for whatever reason) on a pirated rebroadcast and it never hiccupped at all. I had no idea there were problems until I saw bitching afterwards from the suckers that actually paid for Netflix.

I also love how Disney's lost so much fucking money on it, and their numbers just haven't gone up Every year they forecast this insane growth so it'll be profitable but it barely nudges up, even when a ton of their sub count is from 'extras' off other services and free trials. Screw em.

This makes me very pleased. Good luck with guys, maybe another 10 rotten Star Wars shows that nobody even bothers to review or joke about anymore because nobody even hate watches anymore will help.

 

[The Nothingness]

Life is too short to waste on mindless slop.

 

[Zoobles]

the only one I pay for is Peacock for WWE live PLEs, and I get it for $3/month as a veteran so that barely even counts. Everything else I watch is an automated download from Usenet using the *arrs.

 

[Fapcop]

Stream fatigue?

Nah, shit has just gotten too expensive, there’s too many ads, and their original series mostly suck.

Streaming has turned into cable, quelle surprise!

 

[George Lucas]

If they'd have adopted an a la carte model where you could pick and choose what you wanted and pay for that only? Instead of being forced to buy bundles that deliberately ensured the top channels were never all in the same one? They could've probably weathered the cord cutting.

They didn’t do a la carte because they would go out of business entirely. People would pick maybe five channels and then the cable company would either have to go bankrupt or charge a ridiculous price like $10/mo. per channel.

Consider the cost of a local television station. All you need is the video equipment and a giant ass antenna. That’s why OTA TV has been able to survive so long for free. You don’t have infrastructure to maintain outside of the broadcast booth.

Satellite’s a little more expensive, as you have a satellite network to maintain, but those are very reliable.

Cable companies are in hell. They are a no longer a media company but a telecom company. They have to deal with copper, fiber, cable loops, easements, legal disputes, accidentally (or deliberately) cutting some bystander’s phone line, etc. The biggest mistake cable companies made was getting into Internet. Yeah, it gave them a lot of customers, but it also put a huge infrastructure burden on them.

The streaming companies exist by living ‘on top of’ Internet connections and we are seeing how that breaks down when people demand a live service and some part of the chain can’t handle it. Either the streaming services have to step up and build better servers (and raise their prices) or they put more pressure on ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure (and they raise prices). There’s no free lunch here (other than buying an antenna).

And that’s not even getting into the license/franchise fee bullshit.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Retvrn to Blockbvster.

 

[Bland Crumbs]

It is not stream fatigue it is this garbage or worse being the product:

 

[God of Nothing]

Tired of paying? Nah nigga I'm tired of watching.

There's way too much slop and anything half interested gets railroaded or cancelled.

don't forget the ones starting with a few good episodes and then spiraling into shit as they ram up the propaganda

 

[KiwiFuzz2]

Maybe this is just me, but I am convinced that the way these streaming platforms are set up encourages you to spend hours searching for something to watch and adding stuff to your watch list, but not actually ever getting around to watching any of it.

Were you in my house last night?

1. Been watching 7 seasons of a popular show over the past month.
2. Have two episodes left.
3. Took me 10 fucking minutes to navigate to that shit because Amazon's user interface is cluttered with garbage that I would never want to watch.
4. Hit "play" and the fucker refused to load.
5. Navigated over to Netflix.
6. Spent 10 fucking minutes trying to figure out a Plan B.
7. THAT PLAN B WAS HITLER.

I would be less mad at streaming services if the promise and the reality weren't so different, and the main focus of my ire is usually Amazon.

Specifically, I feel like the promise of streaming is being able to watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it, for a nominal monthly fee.

This somehow falls apart in practice, where "What I want to watch" is either on a service I don't have or they're going to charge me extra for it and/or show me ads. Or the fucker just doesn't load for some reason. So I wind up watching WWII or a murder show or GBBS or something low-effort and similar to what I probably could have found surfing cable TV circa 1995.

Fuck.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

DDD is a travel show (and is very good). You can find 16 quadrillion travel shows that lack the host but instead of 45 minutes of edited scenes at 3 locations and jokes,
you can have 45 minutes of a flat, uninteresting guy explaining every dish at a restaurant in a country that interests you.

I guess the major difference for me is TV is "interesting host with a cursory look at the content" and YT is "host is unimportant, here is 45 unedited minutes of the thing you want to see".

TV networks will continue with cooking shows as vehicles for personalities and script writers but for the section of viewers that more or less just want a recipe, YT has the leg up.

One of the things about DDD is that he often talks to the owners about how the restaurant got started and stuff and some behind-the-scenes stuff. I did find this video of some guy that went to Japan and ate a prepared bear paw (among other strange foods) but most of his stuff seems to be the typical overproduced clickbait shit...plus the editing on these things is far worse. And most of the food channels on YouTube are spectacle with people with zero innate cooking ability and just awful people to watch.

Even for non-cooking shows I'd be hard-pressed to name, say, a video game channel that doesn't suck. (That's enough sperging on my account.)

(...) I hate contest format shows. Iron Chef (the Japanese one) is one I can stomach. I cannot stand the faux drama, the annoying editing, the shitty musical stings of modern ones.
This is a problem with American TV, I have watched British contest shows that were far more informative and entertaining.

Speaking of cooking contest format shows, Alton Brown (by that point completely bald) hosted a cooking contest show called Cutthroat Kitchen, basically Iron Chef except trying to fuck over your competition.

The masses weren't dumb, just the companies serving them who somehow failed to think more than 5 minutes ahead in their haste to make line go up.

With a little more forethought? Cable could've survived.

Cable's main problem was that they couldn't find a format that stuck, so every channel that had some unique idea or concept gradually turned into slop. Off the top of my head, A&E (Arts & Entertainment), TLC (The Learning Channel), Boomerang (actual classic cartoons), MTV (the original example), Sci-Fi Channel, G4.