by James Wallace Harris, 7/4/23
I feel like Susan and I have too many monthly subscriptions for watching television, listening to music and books, and reading the news. Everything is going digital, and everything requires a subscription. That increasing number of monthly subscriptions is bothering me, but is it really too many, or a problem?
I decided to create a way to measure their value. I looked at the monthly cost versus the total hours Susan and I use each service and then calculated the hourly cost of using each subscription. The results were surprising.
FYI, the hours were calculated by how much each of us used the service. For example, We both watch Acorn TV together for one hour a night, so the total usage was 60 hours for the month. For YouTube TV, Hulu, Peacock, and Netflix, the hours look very large, but it’s because I add both mine and Susan’s together and because Susan has the TV on in the background while she sews.
684 hours a month seems like a lot of digital content. But remember, most of Susan’s TV watching is while she’s working on her sewing. She’s being more productive than me. I only watch TV when the TV is on. There are 730 hours in a month, times two, which equals 1,460 hours. That means Susan and I spend over a third of our time using digital content.
$260.37 isn’t a huge monthly expense at all then when you think about how much we get out of it.
Even though that’s not that much for two people, I don’t want to waste money and I want to reduce our monthly bills. I consider anything under $1 an hour to be a good value. We are getting the most bang for the buck with TV. It’s news that’s more expensive.
It’s obvious I need to cancel my subscription to Apple News+. Having access to over 300 magazines seems like a fantastic bargain for $9.99 a month, but I never get around to reading many magazines — even though there are over a dozen I want to read. If I read magazines 30 minutes a day, that would be 15 hours for the month, or 66 cents an hour – in the value range. I need to either read more or cancel.
Apple News+ offers several newspapers. I could drop The New York Times and The Washington Post. I’d probably spend at least 30 minutes a day reading the news, which would bring the value under a dollar an hour. However, I want to support both the Times and Post as institutions. I need to think about this. Apple News+ is a bargain for news reading, but it’s terrible for supporting individual magazines and newspapers.
Calculating how much news I read each day should tell me just how many newspapers and magazines I should buy each month. If I was completely honest with myself, that would be one magazine and one newspaper. I’d probably settled on The Atlantic and The New York Times. But even then, most of their content would go unread. My eyes have always been bigger than my stomach when it comes to periodicals. I’m currently buying WAY MORE newspapers and magazines than anybody could ever read in a month, much less what I actually read.
I’m currently getting The New York Times for $6 a month because I quit to get an introductory rate, but when it goes back to $25 a month I don’t think it’s going to be a reasonable value.
We could probably slash that $260 bill for subscriptions. But seeing these expenses laid out like this is quite revealing. Susan and I hardly ever eat out anymore, and we stopped going to the movies, so this pretty much is our entire entertainment/education budget. It’s not that big, especially when you think it’s just $130 apiece.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
Good work! I’m dealing with the same issues. I cut the cable cord recently and I do not miss cable tv one bit. I prefer to read news long form – NYT, WaPo, The Atlantic, The Economist – rather than broadcast TV’s pathetic nuance/context-deprived soundbites (excluding PBS News Hour which I stream). I’m now down to Netflix, Max, Amazon Prime, and toggling between Britbox and Acorn TV. On second thought – I do miss TCM. I really wish TCM would cut the cable cord and start streaming. I would be happy to pay for it. TCM’s Noir Alley with its noir historian Eddie Muller alone would be worth the price of a subscription. I’ve recently become a hard-core budget nerd thanks to YNAB (You Need A Budget) online budgeting app. When I set up my budget and inputted all my subscriptions, I was shocked. I’ve reduced, but feel like I still have way too many. It’s hard to let go of some of them. I think I’ll try your evaluation method.
I’ve been hoping for years that TCM would offer a streaming service. I tried a service from Warner Brothers years ago, but it wasn’t the same. And there was Filmstruck and The Criterion Collection, but they just weren’t the same. Have you read all the recent articles about TCM in the news? Evidently, it has a huge loyal fanbase.
After I cut the cord to cable a decade ago, I started missing TCM. One day I went into an AT&T store to see if I could get a limited cable bundle with TCM. When I walked in a woman asked me if I needed help. I said yes, I want to buy cable TV with just one channel, TCM. She laughed at that and said we don’t sell them at way. I said, what would be the cheapest bundle that had TCM. She looked it up. It was $89. I said that was too much to just watch one channel and left.
This was when my wife worked out of town for ten years. When she moved back we got AT&T streaming cable, and then YouTube TV because Susan can’t live without cable. And I got TCM again.
I wonder if MGM+ is any good for old movies? MAX has a section for TCM, but it’s mostly the hit movies from long ago.
Yes, I have been reading about TCM in the news. I hope the fanbase can help keep it alive. There’s no other channel like it. Those films are American time capsules.
Your table mirrors mine. I suspect it mirrors a lot of us retired baby boomers across America.
Two days ago I watched a new Rock Hudson documentary on Max (I noticed you don’t have Max), and that got me looking for “Magnificent Obsession’, it wasn’t available on any of my services. That irritated me. What I do with those kind of movies is do a search on my Iphone and add ‘OK.RU’ to the name of the movie, and the movie is always there as a video. I stream it to the TV through my Roku. I do that on the Iphone since the Iphone can’t get viruses.
I sort of love Lloyd Douglas movies and did that with “The Robe” and “White Banners”. All movies that are on TCM are on OK.Ru with few exceptions, I suspect. I have youtubeTV too for TCM.
You don’t have scribd. That surprised me. Of course, I have my local library, kanopy, hoopla and so on for free stuff, but Scribd still serves a purpose for me and my wife.
I had HBO Max but canceled it for a while. I’ll watch the Rock Hudson documentary when I sub again.
I also had Scribd for years, and recently canceled it because I have such a huge backlog of audiobooks and Kindle books I haven’t read. I also joined Kindle Unlimited – got 3 months for free trial.
I think I recorded Magnificent Obsession of of TCM. I have YouTube TV which allows for unlimited DVR recording. Things disappear after 90 days, but even still, it means I have several hundred great movies to call upon. They automatically rerecord if the film is shown again.
My library doesn’t offer Hoopla or Kanopy. I just an app, JustWatch to find where to stream films and TV shows. JustWatch says MO is only at DirectTV.
We have Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, Apple TV+, and AMAZON PRIME Video in addition to our Spectrum cable package. That’s more than enough for us. All together, it’s about $200 a month.
I wonder if $200 isn’t a common monthly expense for digital content? But we all just pick different combinations of subscriptions?
Has digital content become a necessity utility?
I think you’re right about $200 being the Sweet Spot for digital content. Different combinations of subscriptions depend on what we want to watch. Right now I’m engrossed in STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS, Season 2 on Paramount+. A third season has already been approved.