Comment by jmyeet

Back when Netflix was $8/month I just had it forever without thinking about it. It was at first a great way to catch up on TV shows. Netflix was after all originally a place for studios to monetize old content, particularly TV. Even at $10/month, it was fine. But it kept going up.

I think I finally cancelled it at $14-15 but I go back for 1-2 months a year to catch up on stuff I want. I basically cycle streaming services.

I've searched for data on how often people do this. I'm 99% sure it's a small minority but I bet it's growing. There is an inertia with subscriptions of every type. People are lazy to cancel things they don't use. It's the entire basis for the gym model.

So somebody is doing the math in the background of working out how much they can raise prices and lose people to subscription cycling vs lazily not cancelling and it still favors raising prices. I suspect at some point that'll change and, when it does, it'll be too late to do anything abou tit.

My suspicion is that this kind of analysis will be a textbook example of a company making short-term optimizations all the way into extinction.

The only research I've found is on comparing to move to cable to streaming and how many streaming services people have. I haven't found anything about streaming churn. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.