Comment by jerf
1 hour ago
But the entire scheme here is to not have them continually. It's better to pay month+$2 in six months when you need it, than 6*month for the months you don't.
If you rotate subscriptions sensibly, they're much cheaper than the old cable model. If you're not looking, they can really bleed you out and be much more expensive than the old model.
You can also pay ~$20/month for an online locker that'll pull the torrent for you and serve to your devices, if that's within your philosophical tolerances. People need to get paid, but I do not much care of the enterprise value of media conglomerates and the resulting enshittification. I don't mind paying for Nebula.tv (~$36/year) and PBS Passport (~$60/year), for example, to directly support those media creators, as well as sending creators fiat directly or via Patreon (Coffeezilla and Peter Santenello, for example).
I have no problem with anyone just sending money if that's what they want to do; I have a number of Patreon supports also. I do strongly advocate for not letting subscriptions leak out without realizing it, and less strongly for considering whether or not you need something like Disney+ continuously or if you can rotate between it and other services.
I canceled a Disney Plus subscription recently (after ordering it largely to watch a specific show), because when I purchased their "ad-free" tier, I found that after paying they just replace their generic ads with their own in-house ads, which they then pretend are different from ads because they're "trailers".
Yet another example of a media company making the paid service a worse viewing experience. (For me, the money isn't the point. My time is limited. I'd happily pay more for the handful of things I have both time and desire to watch. But charging me extra for no ads, and then shoving stuff in my brain anyway, is simultaneously both petty and beyond the pale.)