Yes, I'd like to cancel

The year is 1996. Bill Clinton’s been re-elected, the minimum wage is $4.75/hour, and everyone is, without irony, doing “the macarena.” Watching television means one of two things: free local channels via an antenna-connected TV, or cable. With cable, you pay a monthly fee and gain access to what feels like endless channels.

Fast-forward to 2007. Netflix, a DVD-rental-via-mail business, launched a “streaming” service. Soon, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Apple TV, and others followed, becoming the platforms du jour. Dropping cable became the hip new thing. In 2010, about 105 million American households paid for TV. By 2023, that number was around 73 million.

Though similar to the resurgence of 90’s-era fashion like clogs and mom-jeans, what goes around many times comes back around. And according to the recently released 2023 Deloitte Trends Report, cutting the cord is, once again, in.

Per the report:

• People spend an average of $48/month on subscription services – and about half say that’s too much. In fact, one-third of respondents say they plan on cutting back on the number of services they pay for monthly.
• 44% of Americans have canceled a streaming service subscription in the last six months. That’s up from 37% in 2022.
• The youths are most likely to cancel – 57% of Gen Z and 62% of Millennials said goodbye to at least one service over the last six months.

📺💰 Zoom out: Elsewhere in streaming service land, what was once old might also again become new. Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, and others have all added an ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) option into their pricing models over the past few years. This allows users to watch a platform’s content, but with some ads in between. Sound familiar?

These days, AVOD is about as popular as a jock in a 90s teen movie. Tubi and Pluto TV, the two most widely-used pure AVOD platforms, made up 1.8% of all content viewing in March 2023 (for context, HBO Max accounted for 1.2%).

Plus, Netflix rolled out its AVOD offering last November, and things are going great. The streamer said last week that its per-user monthly revenue is higher for someone on its ad-supported plan ($6.99 fee + ad revenue) than a user paying $15.49 for the standard ad-free plan.

Who knows. One day soon we might just see all the streamers bundle up their ad-supported channels and charge customers one fee for all of it. Wonder what they’d call it…