this sounds economical but also a major chore

Not at all. I do the same thing, and the key is to cancel the subscription immediately upon signing up. You keep the one month you've already paid for, and don't need to worry about recurring cost.

But that's literally (literally 'literally', not an annoying turn of phrase) a monthly 'chore' to sign up for (and cancel) the next one.

Doesn't have to be monthly - sometimes I have months at a time with no subscription running at all. Once one "fills up" or there is a specific show I want to watch _now_, I activate that service and immediately cancel it. I guess it is more of a chore than just leaving them all subscribed and having access whenever - but the savings are easily worth it to me.

I do the same thing. The only inconvenience is it adds an extra step when you want to watch something after your subscription runs out (resume the subscription and cancel). Google play and the app store make this super easy.

Binging a few shows and then not watching anything for months is probably a healthier lifestyle, but I imagine most people with streaming subscriptions are too accustomed to watching something every day/week/certainly month for that - guilty myself, exhibit above: I just assumed 'sign up and cancel in any month you want to watch something' would mean every month!

I recently forgot to cancel a one month free trial for a HTC Vive marketplace (yes, even they got some bullshit monthly sub going), and they locked me into a year long commitment.

I’ve turned very sour to these monthly renewals and accounts I can’t keep track of anymore.

To use a deeply HN metaphor, it's kind of like pulling in a 3rd party library into your source code. No matter how convenient it is at the moment, you have to account for the cost of the ongoing maintenance over time; sometimes you look at that and decide just to never pull the library in the first place.

Similarly, if I'm on the fence about some service, this is the tie breaker for me; the risk of forgetting to cancel it. Even though I do scan my bank account around once a month, I do naturally pay more attention to the bigger transactions and can easily skim past a $8.99 for a few months before noticing I accidentally left something on.

(Fortunately, where I am, it's just an annoyance. Affording individual subscriptions to all the things I may conceivably at some point want to use would be a noticeable kick in the pants, what with the proliferation of them, but accidentally leaving on one service is just an annoyance.)

I’m now using virtual disposable card for any subscription to a service I'm not sure to use more than one month. If I forget it that means I don't use it and the subscription will end itself.

If I somehow still need it after the first month, I usually get a email reminder or a message about payment processing failure and I can fix that with a non-disposable card.

what do you use for the disposable card?

I have a capital one credit card that allows unlimited virt cards that basically can only be used at one online merchant. I use this card exclusively for subscriptions, then pay it off every month.

It highly depends on your country, some banks offer that as a service (most do in France where I live) in EU a lot of online banks do too (Revolut, Lydia, N26, etc) I don't know in the US, I think privacy.com does but I have no recommendation.

I’ve used Privacy.com in the US. works great!

FYI you can usual cancel immediately after signing up and it'll keep working until the next bill is due

Still sounds stressful and like a chore. I would feel "forced" to burn through as much of the backlog as possible during that month, even if I don't feel like watching something from it right now.

May be. To me it's easily worth the hundreds of Euros in savings from not having running subscriptions to more than one service at a time. Oftentimes I have no running streaming subscriptions at all. I guess I watch a lot less than many people do.

Related to what olex said, if you're "saving" over $100/month because you don't have 8 other subscriptions running, you can tell yourself quite reasonably you're already saving a lot of money and you don't need to squeeze the value out of a monthly subscription that's less than one fast food meal's worth of money.

The whole point is to enjoy the service; if you feel stressed because you feel forced to binge everything to get your "value", well, cancel that service too. It is apparently not bringing you that value. That will help you get over it pretty quickly.

Just automate the watching process too, and get ChatGPT to summarise the content. Even better if you can let it watch with you, give it feedback, and tune it over time so it can make a value call on shows and save you the effort - "yeah I watched that, so you don't have to, you'll hate it". (/s, but I imagine it won't be in a year or two or with a skilled coder).

I hear, it’s doable and it works but very few people do it because it takes patience and care. Most of these services use dark patterns to lure users into not doing that. If a larger percentage of users did it streaming services would quickly change policies.

someone is making a rails app right now to enable this as a SAAS. Now you have two problems ..

I use virtual cards generated on privacy.com for streaming services. You can set the limit based on how many months you want to pay for, and not worry about forgetting to cancel.

Seems like it could be an opportunity for a website with all the news shows and movies on each platform. You check off the ones that seem interesting. It tells you what service to subscribe to after you hit a threshold. Not sure if any of the services have affiliate programs for revenue.

Justwatch provides a lot of that and I bet you could automate the rest

Auto-expiring temporary credit card numbers can help automate cancellations after N months, but figuring what shows are on what services and signing up for them as needed is still a major chore.

The Playpilot app helps to get an overview over where (on what streaming services) a movie or show is available.

We use JustWatch[0]. It's good for keeping a "want to watch" list and also tells you which of your services has which films at any one time.

[0] https://www.justwatch.com/

Do you have more details? I found that in my case the credit card provider has ways to continue paying for the subscription through the magic of recurring charges that is very difficult to stop (survives credit card cancelation/number changes).

Right, getting a new card number has nothing to do with the fact that it is the same account. The numbers point to the same account.

It seems the credit card providers would have an anti-incentive to provide this kind of consumer friendly functionality. Maybe Apple's card does? Any first-hand accounts?

Capital One's Eno service allows you to generate temporary credit card numbers with a custom expiration date.

The problem with that is that legally, the contract to pay a provider, and the instruction to your credit-card company to pay a recurring amount, are two separate things. Some companies will send threatening letters, dept collectors etc after you if you just cancel the CC instruction.

It's different on the apple store, where Apple forced providers to agree that a subscription could be unilaterally cancelled via the store. Ideally we would pass a law so that credit cancellation also cancels a contract as long as the minimum period is over. Not holding my breath though.

This would be annoying for people whose credit card just happened to expire and who then have to deal with not having the service for a period, re-signing up, losing loyalty bonuses, etc.

Credit card expiry can have integrations where the merchant automatically gets the updated value

> Some companies will send threatening letters, dept collectors etc after you if you just cancel the CC instruction.

What companies do this in practice. I think I’ve “ghosted” 300 companies and never had a single even send a threatening letter, much less do anything. Usually I get an email of “error processing your card, please fix or we turn off.”

I can’t imagine it is ever economical to pursue in courts over an $11.99/month contract.

The exception is gyms that do seem to go to ends of the earth to collect.

Zipcar tried to do it to me once. But it may depend on your jurisdiction as well.

I had a colleague who used to get monthly calls from a cable co. He was divorced from his wife, who had set up the cable contract, so they wouldn't let him cancel it but were still convinced that he was liable for the money because it was supplying his house.

I wish I had the discipline to manage things that way.

This implies there is something about """you""" that is inherently lacking rather than the habits currently in your brain and "more discipline" often means """if only I would castigate myself more"""

Because I view them via an AppleTV, I subscribe to Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, and AppleTV at various different times all through my iTunes account. It's easy to turn them on and off all through one account interface. The Account Settings page lists both Active and Expired accounts for all the services, along with next billing or expiration dates. It's just a few clicks.

Market opportunity!

A meta streaming service that dispatches you towars the service that has the show you want to watch. Of course it needs to work in colaboration with the actual streaming services and diatribute revenue proportional to services' use. It would create much more real-time competition.

This in a few sentences summarizes everything that sucks about the current streaming landscape

It does, and it feels quite high effort to maintain. I'd rather simply disengage and find something else to do. The plus side of all this BS is it might force me back toward more interesting and worthwhile pasttimes than just bingewatching TV shows and films. From that point of view, I suppose, long may the suck multiplication continue.

I'd love a website I could enter my account info for these streaming sites and turn each one on, one month at a time, with a click of a button. This would attract the ire of streaming companies though.

This would be a fun idea. Especially if this was combined with your watchlist. The website could decide you have most stuff on your wishlist for service X, automatically cancel/subscribe, and send you an e-mail with a summary of what you can watch in the upcoming month.

This is what Plex has branched into, kinda, although there's no automatic subscription management since no service wants to give up control of cancellations and whatnot.

Realistically it’s already very easy to do this. Sure it’s not one click, but it takes all of 30 seconds.

The DoNotPay app does that. You can make a card for a specific account or trial and share account access through it too.

Considering how frecuently movies (and third party shows) disappear from one platform to appear in other that seems hellish.

It's easier to pirate stuff.

I do the same thing as the parent commenter, I pay for service, but will move from one service to another based on content and what I've watched.

Funny that the proliferation of streaming services has just decreased the duration of my subscription to any one of them.

I said in another comment I pay for some services too, but if my online experience have taught me anything is that I can't trust them to be around, or be good forever.

I used House of the Dragon as an example, I watched it on HBO max but I also downloaded it and shared it online. One of my favorite shows (Future Man) is now on D+ but I am not going to delete it from my collection.

It all comes to: "I don't trust others with the data I care for"

It depends on the movie. Friends might drop from Netflix, but there’s a lot of content being made that’s wholly owned by the streaming service itself that will stick around forever. Especially with Disney.

HBO is proving that to not necessarily be the case.

HBO is removing many: https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/westworld-hbo-max-the-never...

Apparently to make them available on other ad supported networks: https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/23513277/westworld-hbo-...

Besides what other have said it's a matter of time netflix starts to delete cancelled series because they are a waste.

My experience is that the learning curve for piracy has increased quite a bit. IIUC you need some private tracker to reliably source things, something that takes time and connections most people don't have.

Despite being strongly motivated to find and watch things that are inexplicably unavailable to me (especially new foreign cinema) I usually just wait, and then sign up for a trial of whatever service has it a year or more after I read the review.

> My experience is that the learning curve for piracy has increased quite a bit. IIUC you need some private tracker to reliably source things, something that takes time and connections most people don't have.

Only if you want rare and older stuff (and even then, only sometimes). Anything mainstream, a public tracker is more than enough.

Are content owner letters/lawsuits still a thing? Piracy was cool(tm) when I was a broke high school student, but now that I have assets worth being sued over (and now that if my ISP cut me off I couldn't just move to a different apartment at a moment's notice) I'll just pay for the Bluray or for a month of Hulu or whatever, it's far simpler.

I have a significant legitimate media library (>1TB), I have the Plex/Kodi infrastructure to stream it to my TV, but going one step further and mixing in piracy is a step I'm not willing to take.

Depends on your country. In Germany: Extremely. Probably a few seconds of uploading (of a movie or porn, don’t think they care much for other things) will get you a letter (edit: C&D + damages, courts see it as commercial distribution, so the letter blackmails you to pay 300-500 € instead). Or you can use a VPN.

As I said in another post, I like to pay when given the option and I don’t have to jump through tons of hoops.

Interesting. Here in Chile we can do almost everything with our Intenert connection.

I dont know now that we signed the TPP11 how things are going to change.

It's very Germany-specific, the whole "commercial distribution" bullshit is what enables the cottage industry of blackmail lawyers

you just need to pay a few dollars for a foreign seedbox that is expressly designed for this purpose

you can then just set the seedbox as a source in kodi, I can even add torrents while sitting on my couch on my phone with the mobile interface

I have shared accounts to a variety of streaming services that I pay for but I largely prefer using kodi as it's a much more pleasant experience

If you are in a lenient country you'll be fine with a public tracker, and it's easy to deploy sonarr and some torrent client to download things automatically.

I haven't torrented in forever. I usually just google "Watch XXXX online free" or check a few sites that I frequent that allow you to stream them.

It's (almost) as easy as looking something up on youtube.

Why would "normal" people muck about with torrent software? I think it's mostly the groups doing (and monetizing) the re-uploads that bother with torrents

It's the fragmentation and lack of ease of use that does it. If I had a NAS and Jellyfin setup, I'd have a catalog of basically everything available to stream; I wouldn't have to look a dozen different places to see if anyone has it available; I'd not have to worry about the streaming rights switching to another service in the middle of a show I'm watching; I'd not have to search through a bunch of different services to find where exactly I purchased it; I wouldn't have to learn a bunch of different inconsistent crappy, buggy interfaces; previous purchases wouldn't mysteriously disappear.

Throw all that on top of not being forced to watch the same ad for Rings of Power the thousandth time in a row, a much broader library of content, a better library of subtitles, and no performance issues.

I'm happy to pay for things that deliver usable experiences. Concretely, I'd gladly pay $200/month for a good streaming service that avoids the pitfalls mentioned. But I'm not going to pay money to subject myself to abusive practices and terrible experiences.

it's too much work for entertainment, that's the whole problem. We as users, shouldn't be doing anything clever to get our content. I have 5 streaming services, and sometimes I hope from one to another, searching for a movie to find out that no one of them have it. Then going to google and find out that the movie is hosted on a different streaming service. No fun.

The JustWatch app can sort-of do this. It aggregates the library index of all the streaming services so you can see what movies are where.

https://www.justwatch.com/ automates this.. great service

Are there any products or tools for managing this kind of thing?

I generally want my lists of books/films/music playlists whatever that I've seen, reviewed or marked as "to watch" to be managed seperately from any one particular vendor, and owned by me.

There seems to be some movement towards this with e.g. smart TVs that will search all your apps for shows, and sites that will tell you where a specific film or show is available, but I've not seen anything either super geeky, or super easy to use.

I don't know if this is what you're asking specifically, but I use justwatch.com to see where I can watch stuff. Sometimes (it happened to me last night) one of those weird internet channels has what you're looking for...

Without telling you to pirate: What you're describing is Sonarr / Radarr with Plex / Jellyfin.

The former lets you put in a list of shows / movies you want it to download, and it'll check against public and private trackers periodically until it finds what you're after. The media you want doesn't even have to be released - an IMDB or TVDB link is enough.

The latter makes it easy to stream anywhere, download ahead of flights, and tracks watched status. Plex especially is fantastically easy for family to use.

Setup is "easy" in that it's an afternoon or less for the kind of people browsing HN, and using it is actually easy for anyone else you care to share the service with. Combined, it checks all your requirements of pulling in reviews from you and others, watched status tracking, and owned by you.

Trakt.tv lets you bookmark, rate, and keep track of the sites and movies you watch. They also have an API which is used by other apps, such as kodi.

That looks like exactly what I was thinking of, the fact that they use the verb 'scrobble' to describe this tracking suggests they're on the same wavelength as me, so thanks for the tip.

When clever people start creating their own personal systems to deal with it, movie streaming has a serious problem. What about the rest of us who aren't so clever?