Image by Icon Factory - The Noun Project
I am a big fan of technology, there is no doubt that technology has improved my life significantly. Technology has been advancing exponentially of the past few decades and by far the biggest advancement has been the introduction of streaming services.
I am old enough to remember black and white TV, with just 3 channels, I am old enough to remember fax machines to send letters electronically, I am old enough to remember dial-up broadband at tortoise/turtle speeds, so the fact that we can stream movies and music is just mind blowing. Thank you to the engineers for creating this for us, we are truly grateful or are we?
TV never used to cost much, okay I am in the U.K. and we do pay an annual licence fee to watch programmes on the BBC, about £13.25 per month at time of writing and in return we receive no ads, yippee!
In fact when I was a lad in The Netherlands, TV cost nothing, you listened to the radio for music, which also cost nothing and you bought a few albums, which did cost money, but you could play them over and over for nothing.
Times have changed big time, roll-on Sky TV (satellite TV), roll-on streaming channels, first one was Netflix of course, they killed off the video-hire business, like Blockbuster, roll-on music streaming services, many pirate ones existed and perhaps still do, but Spotify won the day and many more rolled in to town since those early days when none of us really knew where it would lead.
Well it has lead to a situation that means we are spoiled for choice. There are literally dozens of options to choose from but are you getting value for money? Humans are habitual in nature, we work during the day and relax in the evening before going to bed. We like relaxing maybe with a good book, perhaps playing with the kids or pets, going for a walk and very likely most of us enjoy sitting down in front of the TV, the big square screen that has stories playing on it, which of course keeps us glued to the couch and our eyes firmly fixed on that screen. Yes I know, I do fall asleep sometimes too and if it is too boring, yeah I'm on my iPad or iPhone too just in case I will be missing something important in my email or social channels. Of course I never miss out on anything, it's just another habitual conditioned habit.
Tech and Entertainment companies have realised that the best way to empty people's bank accounts is to provide them with monthly or annual subscription services. If you don't subscribe you will miss out on all their splendid services or in the case of Spotify you get some ads playing in between your music.
Let's take the example of video streaming services, which now include movies, serials and documentaries, all amazing stuff that you can't afford to miss. Remember that the existing channels, 5 major ones and hundreds of others are still mostly free to view and are pushing out their new and exciting content too. This gives us all a great dilemma, either miss out on the juicy content provided by the videos streaming services or watch the regular content on Freeview TV.
Years ago I subscribed to Sky TV, as well as paying for my BBC TV Licence as well, this was before streaming services existed. I came to realise that I wasn't spending half as much time as I thought I was watching the programmes that were exclusive to Sky TV, so I cancelled it. Then I moved in with my now wife and she was paying for Sky too, so after some years of realising that we were hardly watching anything that we could get through Sky, we cancelled that and went to Freesat. Free TV through your satellite, you only pay for the box once, no more monthly recurring payment, it saved us over £400 per year I reckon.
I was listening and absorbing some content from the USA via a podcast called Pivot with Kara Swisher, who I highly respect and Professor Scott Galloway, who I do also respect but have a few issues with how he comes across sometimes. Scott has been quite critical of all the big tech companies and even wrote a book about it called, The hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, it's a fascinating read. On one of their podcast episodes Scott explained that Tech companies and also other companies were moving big time towards 'Recurring Revenue Bundles' or 'Rundles' for short. It was then it occurred to me that this is exactly what is indeed happening, not just to me, but to everyone on the planet who could potentially afford it.
So out of fun and to bring to the attention of others, I started putting together a table, (see below), to try and figure out what anyone might be forking out each month on their 'Rundles'. It’s just a random table, I will need to do some further research on this, maybe using LinkedIn Polls, although I am fed up of them myself, so wouldn’t want to do the same to others.
See, the companies that offer these deals know that you won’t be switching off the auto payments each month, as human nature as it is, we can’t be bothered with all the hassle of switching it on and off. It’s like electricity, we just expect it to be there when we need it and as long as we believe we can afford it the payments just go out.
I believe that most of us are spending somewhere between £500 - £1000 per year on these subscription services.
In the table I included the TV licence fee as well as an average cost of Broadband, because you wouldn't be able to access any of these services unless you have broadband too. So in my case where we only subscribe to Netflix our costs allowing for the TV licence and Broadband comes to a hefty £530 per year already. I dread to think what others are paying. I left Apple as the individual charges for each of they services excluding their iCloud storage. I know they have the Apple One subscription service but as always, it's never quite 100% the way you would want it. I'm sure in the future they will allow you to mix and match many services as will many other companies.
But what if you're really not able to watch all these services, because after all you only have so many hours in a day and then you have to fit in work, sleep and some play too. I reckon the amount we are all spending on these subscription services far outweighs the value we are getting from them, which means we are probably wasting a lot of hard-earned money and just handing it over each month to these Tech companies who are cleaning up big time!
They are just getting more valuable every year at the expense of us. Maybe it's time for you to review your monthly entertainment subscription spend. Good luck and I hope you will cancel some services and keep the money in your bank account.