Rotating Video Streaming Services

The Wednesday Morning Weekly.

This is my first post of dozens on how we save money, sharing various frugality tips I’ve learned over the years. The frugality hacks add up to thousands upon thousands of dollars saved each year when implementing them all.

I’ll never share any uncomfortable, unsafe or unreasonable hacks. For example, a comfortable air conditioned home is very important to us and I will simply work an extra bank account bonus in a given year to recoup the $200 per year we would of otherwise saved by making the home uncomfortable year round by keeping the temperatures very high in the summer and low in the winter. Not only is this frugality idea uncomfortable, it is also dangerous as well since I am older and heat intolerant with some medical conditions. It’s easy to just spend two extra hours per year to work the single extra bank account needed for year round comfort and safety. Again I try and be reasonable here and not too obsessed with saving every penny.

One streaming service per month. We aren’t currently subscribed to any paid video streaming services, but when we are, we subscribe to no more than a single paid service in a given month. We binge watch all the shows we want during this time period with that particular streaming service. The following month, we move onto another streaming service, binge watching that material. Rinse and repeat with any number of other streaming services. We eventually circle back and repeat this loop again over and over.

This saves quite a bit of money only having one service at a time and allows us to still see all the content we like. It also makes things simpler since we aren’t overwhelmed by content from multiple services — we can just focus on the single service for an entire month.

After we subscribe, we immediately cancel to avoid it automatically renewing the following month. If for some reason we cannot do this immediate cancellation thing, we setup a calendar event with an alert to remind us to cancel a day or two before the renewal date.

Another nice thing about it not auto-renewing, is you won’t pay for days (or weeks) you don’t use the service; e.g. you might be going on a vacation or simply not into TV for a few weeks — this saves a lot of extra money.

You could plan your rotation based on a particular series you are interested in. Like at the time of this writing House of the Dragon on HBO is one of my favorite shows and is currently at episode three in the second season. I see on Wikipedia the last show of the season will air on August 4th. So I might plan for a month of HBO in the month of August, it being my only paid service for that month. Then I’ll binge watch the entire House of the Dragon series in August along with whatever else I find interesting on HBO.

A little math. Say one is subscribed to four streaming services per month at an average of $12 per month. That’s $48 per month or $576 per year. By reducing this to just one service per month it’s just $144 per year. And say you only renew it 70% of the time, this reduces the cost down to $108 per year — about one fifth the cost with over $450 saved per year. You still get to see all your shows, just maybe at times a little later than others might see it — which is perfectly fine for us.

Free Streaming. Also we often get paid streaming services for free, as we are currently with Paramount Plus; it is included in the monthly Walmart+ subscription we have which Amex reimburses each month as part of the benefits of the American Express Business Gold card I opened with them late last year. There is quite a bit of content on this Paramount Plus service, we were shocked.

Apple often offers free subscriptions as well for a few months, which can be had from Best Buy etc. There are even some hacks people do to get this Apple subscription for free over and over, but I am not familiar with them yet.

There are also many other streaming channels for free on Roku, etc. supported by ads. We personally don’t make use of these much since we really dislike ads.

Amazon Prime Video. There is also a lot of actually great content with Amazon Prime Video, but we currently don’t have an Amazon Prime Subscription. We aren’t happy with how much they’ve increased the annual membership along with adding commercials to Amazon Prime Video, so we quit Amazon Prime. Now, when we order from Amazon, we do so by putting at least $35 of items in the cart for the free shipping. Honestly, as time goes by, we are finding we are buying less and less from Amazon. Their prices and service don’t seem to be as good as they used to be. Here is an interesting thread on Mr. Money Mustache forum about people quitting Amazon Prime: https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/share-your-badassity/quit-amazon-prime/

If Amazon offers a free month of Prime, or say Prime for a week for $1.99, we might take them up on that offer and then binge watch a TV show series they offer. We can also include Amazon Prime Video in the single service per month rotation idea presented above.

Btw, the Pepper App is currently a great alternative to the Chase Amazon Prime card for us as we can instantly buy the exact size Amazon gift card we need at a 7%+ discount — so we really don’t miss the 5% cashback the Chase Amazon Prime card would give us with the expensive Prime membership.

Alternatives

Over the Air DVR. We have a lifetime Plex Pass and with it we get DVR capabilities, which includes a TV guide and ability to record entire TV show series with a couple clicks — similar to TIVO. This is especially good for local broadcasts. The recording quality is in HD. We have a decent $125 small ATSC antenna near the top of our roof, pointed at the broadcast towers which gets great reception in the city we live in. We also use the SiliconDust dual channel ATSC network tuner. We ditched cable TV around 15 years ago, which is a huge money saver.

YouTube. Much of the video content we watch is content from various YouTube channels costing us nothing. I can go weeks or even months without needing a streaming service subscription.

Library. If you drive by a library frequently or go there anyways for books, you can grab some movies there for free on Bluray or DVD. We personally don’t do this as we only go shopping every other week and it doesn’t make sense to us to waste gas and time. Also remembering to have to return a video, for us at least is tedious.