As content-streaming companies continue to raise their prices and crack down on account sharing, a bigger percentage of customers have been canceling their subscriptions.
The volume of people in the US nixing subscriptions to major streaming services such as Apple TV+, Discovery+, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock, and Starz rose to 6.3% in November 2023 from 5.1% a year earlier, according to data from subscription-analytics provider Antenna.
And nearly one quarter — 24% — of US subscribers canceled at least three of those subscriptions over the past two years, as of November. That's up from 15% in November 2021.
Netflix said in May 2023 that it would start charging US subscribers an extra $8 to add additional users who live outside their household to their accounts and raised prices for both its lowest tier ad-free plan and its premium plan just a few months ago. HBO raised its Max subscription prices last January. Amazon Prime Video recently announced that it would be introducing ads, which subscribers would have to pay an additional $3 a month to avoid. Apple raised the price of an Apple TV+ subscription by $3 in October. And Disney raised the prices for both Disney+ and Hulu back in August.
All those little increases add up. Many consumers, it seems, are saving where they can.
This doesn't necessarily mean that those subscriptions stay canceled, though. Some users — whom Antenna refers to as "serial churners" — repeatedly subscribe and cancel streaming accounts rather than maintaining continuous subscriptions.
