Many more people are jumping from one streaming subscription to another, a behavior that could have big implications for the entertainment industry.

Americans are getting increasingly impulsive about hitting the cancellation button on their streaming services. More than 29 million — about a quarter of domestic paying streaming subscribers — have canceled three or more services over the last two years, according to Antenna, a subscription research firm. And the numbers are rising fast.

The data suggests a sharp shift in consumer behavior — far from the cable era, when viewers largely stuck with a single provider, as well as the early days of the so-called streaming wars, when people kept adding services without culling or jumping around.

Among these nomadic subscribers, some are taking advantage of how easy it is, with a monthly contract and simple click of a button, to hopscotch from one service to the next. Indeed, these users can be fickle — a third of them resubscribe to the canceled service within six months, according to Antenna’s research.

“In three years, this went from a very niche behavior to an absolute mainstream part of the market,” said Jonathan Carson, the chief executive of Antenna.

Non-paywall link

  • Omgboom@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    8 months ago

    You can change the settings in Plex and still access it locally without Internet connection. But yeah Plex is kinda behind the curve on a lot of things, although jellyfin has it’s own issues

    • circuscritic
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      8 months ago

      Plex requires an account and that account has to connect to an external Plex authentication server every so often. If that token expires and you have no internet, you will be locked out of your Plex.

      • Omgboom@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        8 months ago

        You can disable auth on your local network. I’ve never experienced any issues with my authentication token expiring without having Internet, and I had my Plex server offline for months last year while I was living in a place that didn’t have Internet. For some reason though it runs noticeably shittier without Internet, it takes a long time for a video file to load.