I’ve got a whole assortment, that Prime-thingy, Netflix, Sky, Paramount, Apple, Disney - but like @secretagentfan I only watch a select few things.
On Apple it’s Teheran, on Disney Only Murders and The Bear.
Recently, Amazon messages me to tell me my ‘BBC Player’ was missing me, because I just fail to finally watch Doctor Who beyond early Tennant - but the wife watches most of the cozy crime so that’s at least a reason to keep it.
Most of my other subscriptions are similarly underused. Some of the stuff is no doubt good - but often one spends an hour in the menu without settling for anything. And especially the Netflix offerings tend to resemble each other, only switching from Poland to Britain to Spain to Germany; there’s a certain predictability to productions.
A bit like Chinese food, you leave the restaurant feeling bloated and strangely empty. I recently sat through eight episodes of Harlan Coben - but I couldn’t tell you anything about it except that the main character was cast entirely unconvincing.
So are you missing out? Depends. If somewhere in the near future you expect to host grandchildren, a Disney subscription might come in handy so you can park them for weeks in front of the telly, the way we - well, I at least - grew up.
The ‘classic’ Hollywood output, the films they used to show on the telly up to the 90s, is spread across a whole range of services. But often you can find them on a ppv basis on, for example, Prime. So that’s not necessarily worth a whole subscription.
But if one wants to be pleasantly surprised by some out-of-the-blue discovery - like I was with Blue Eye Samurai recently - then there’s no getting around several subscriptions and mostly ignoring them until existential ennui lets you spend a whole evening zapping through submenus and watching trailers.
