More And More People Are Cutting Their Streaming TV Services

With fears of a recession looming larger every day, and inflation raging for months, it seems people are looking to find ways to save money. They may have found one in cutting their streaming services.

The newest edition of the quarterly media consumption tracking survey from Attest, a consumer research platform, found that subscription TV services declined from October to December.

Just over 15% of Americans now say they do not use any TV subscription services. That’s up 2.8 percentage points compared to October 2022.

Attest said in a release that the decline could be a result of cost of living increases, which are forcing Americans to make tough choices about where they spend their money. Record inflation rates, which have finally started to come down, led to increases in what people paid for groceries, rent and utilities over the past year.

That means they can no longer afford all the extras they became used to when the economy was in better shape and their dollars could go farther, pre-pandemic.

Of course, other factors could also be impacting the numbers. With Covid lockdowns and long-term quarantines largely a thing of the past, people are no longer trapped inside their houses and starved for entertainment, which sparked a big uptick in subscriptions to top streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ at the start of the pandemic.

Too, streaming subscriptions can be cyclical, with people signing up when a show they want to watch is available and dropping those subscriptions later.

Attest found that overall weekly users were down for most subscription services, with Disney+ seeing the biggest hit. Those who used the service at least once a week fell by 5.4%, to 32.3% of respondents.

Hulu (down 4.6%) and YouTube (down 3.9%) also suffered bigger drops in weekly users than other services. AppleTV+, which had been surging in earlier in 2022, saw its numbers slide, though that again could be due to programming; the streamer had some more prominent premieres in the first half of the year.

Netflix (which just launched a new hit with That ’90s Show) and Amazon Prime also experienced slight drop-offs but remained the top streaming platforms even as they looked for new ways to stand out. Netflix has been boosted by its new ad-supported tier, too.

One victor in the fourth-quarter doldrums? Peacock. The service, which reported big gains in subscribers in its most recent earnings period, boosted weekly users by 3.4 percentage points.

And Paramount+, which had the quarter’s most popular show, according to the survey, with Yellowstone and also premiered Top Gun: Maverick, saw a very small increase in weekly users.

Interestingly, subscription streaming wasn’t the only medium to experience a reduction in users during fourth quarter. The problem plagued multiple media, including social media, audio and news platforms. So it’s possible that people were just feeling burnt out from media of all types or that they needed to hit their internal reset buttons.