I quit Netflix, bought an aerial and went back to free TV. Was it worth the savings?
In July, Netflix announced that it had lost approximately 1 million subscribers in just three months. It was a remarkable reversal of fortunes for a company that, just a year ago, seemed to be on an unstoppable path to global domination – and although it has regained some subscribers this month, the company is still struggling to retain viewers in the long term.
That’s because with the price of everything rising, many people are hoping to save cash – and breaking up with a streaming services is an easy fix. In a 2021 survey conducted by Financebuzz, 46% of respondents said they spent over $50 a month on streaming and a new survey found that one in four of Netflix’s remaining customers are considering dropping the service by the end of the year.
But paying for monthly subscription fees for streaming services or an expensive cable bill aren’t the only options. Last year, people bought about 8.5 million analogue TV antennas, which have become cheaper, smaller, and smarter than they were in the 1990s. In New York, for example, a high-quality antenna can pick up more than 100 channels. Plus, if you have a smart TV then you probably already have access to literally thousands of channels, shows, and movies through free streaming services such as Pluto TV, Tubi and Roku.
There was a time in my life when I didn’t watch TV. That time was called “my early twenties”, and I was much more fun than I am now. As I’ve progressively become more of a homebody, I’ve racked up subscriptions to major content providers like Netflix and Amazon Prime, signed up for services so that I could watch a single show (Showtime and Twin Peaks: The Return, I’m looking at you), and experimented with niche services that seemed neat but mainly just repackaged stuff that I could watch elsewhere (this includes Mubi, which offers a tightly curated, rotating list of 30 must-see films, as well as Hi-Yah, which mostly shows martial arts movies). After all this time, more than a small
