See, that’s why individual examples are helpful, I wouldn’t have guessed many subscribe to that many services at a time. Now I see an example of someone who does!
I signed up for the same 3 year promo you did and I stuck around for the 4th year with what I'm guessing was the same special discount offer you did and after that, I let my sub go. The content was getting worse, the price was going up and ads
(or price was going up even more).
I now have it as an existing part of my cable (that I'm locked into thanks to my neighborhood association). They've got me back but besides advertising, are they making new money off me this way?
I have Apple+, Netflix, and Hulu included with my cell service. I assume they all make some sort of money that way beyond the ads but my bill is the same whether I use these services or not so I'm guessing whatever it is they're getting paid, it's paltry.
The only two I'm currently actually paying for are Max (at a promo of about $6 a month) and Amazon and their ecosystem is so far up my rear I think you'd have to sever a connection directly from my brain to break that so I'm not sure I'd say I'm there for the streaming or that I'd leave if the streaming left.
The Amazon model clearly appears sustainable to me because that was baked into how the service was conceived.
Apple
never even has to break even on their service.
As for the rest, I wonder how many of their subscribers are like me or are on the el-cheapo plans. Last Black Friday, Hulu was offering $1 a month for 12 months and you could add Disney+ to that for $2.99 a month. It was weird because D+ wasn't offering any real deal, themselves and this was a pretty aggressive deal set to expire in the fall.
If I have to go from "free" to more than $11 a month for each of these, they're going to become a revolving door because at this stage, I'm not seeing new content that interests me on most of them, most of the time.
But as long as I'm not paying, I'm not churning even if I'm not watching the ads as a result of me not watching the stale content.
Is someone like me who isn't churning actually benefiting them beyond a positive looking number in an Excel table?
Obviously, nobody's exactly like me but I wonder how many find themselves in a
similar position and I wonder if with whatever behind-the-scenes deals the streamers have made, that'll be sustainable.
I guess if they keep trying to go cheap on the content that'll hold them over for a while longer but that's a big part of why they aren't getting my advertising eyeballs.