Another year in the life of a cord cutter
In 2019 we wrote a blog post that summarized how much we spent on various streaming services for all of 2018.
2020 has been one weird year for everyone and as a result we thought we’d go over our streaming overview for this year as we enter December and count down to the end of this year.
The main subscription based streaming services we used in our household throughout 2020 were Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max and Amazon Prime.
You’ll notice in the chart below that some of the services have small breaks between when we renewed the services. As an example there are sometimes days, weeks and even months that went by before we turned our HBO Max subscription back on.
This is by choice, because the HBO shows we watch sometimes went on hiatus for a week or two. Sometimes we just were busy watching other things. Again there was no point in paying for it if we weren’t going to use it and none of the content is going anywhere, it would be there on demand if and when we were ready to watch it.
There is a huge gap in the summer around May and June where I paused many of our services for a month because we actually had a bunch of camping trips. So I actually downloaded a lot of stuff offline on my tablet from Netflix, Hulu and HBO Max to watch while we were camping.
As a hockey fan I also paid for the NHL streaming service during the shortened season.
Apple has gifted most people a free year of Apple TV+ so that service which we used on occasion so far hasn’t cost me anything in 2020.
We paid for a one month subscription of Disney+ as well as one month of Peacock & CBS All Access US.
We also did a 7 day free trial of Epix Now and Philo as well as a 30 day free trial of StackTV.
All in the total we wound up spending on subscription based streaming services including exchange rates was $726.21 Canadian.
As with our previous article this cost was for our household of two people but we also share many of our streaming services with several friends and family members. Every single households costs are going to be different because everyone approaches streaming differently.
That is the whole point.
As an example our Netflix, Hulu and Amazon accounts get shared with 4 other households, our HBO Max service we share with 6 other households. I shared the NHL service and Peacock with two other households and our Disney+ service with one other household.
Subscription based streaming services that we used throughout 2020
The average cost in 2020 for cable was about $150 a month, according to the vast majority of would be cord cutters we spoke with throughout this year. That comes out to $1800 a year before tax.
That means we saved $1073.74 this year from not having cable in our single household. Add to that $1800 for the 4 other households who we share our streaming services with who also don’t have cable means all of us collectively saved $9347.53 for all of 2020.
While we used all of the above paid subscription based services often, we also benefited from accessing a fair amount of content on many of the numerous free or TV Everywhere streaming services that offer up content at no charge.
This includes CBC Gem, CTV, Global, CityTV, YouTube, BBC iPlayer, My 5, All 4, iTV Hub, Crackle, PBS and many others.
Free streaming services that we used throughout 2020
On top of that with a cable login and password from a family member in the US and another in Canada I was able to login into many TV Everywhere streaming apps and use them for free on occasion.
Some of the most common ones we accessed and used included US apps from HGTV, Food Network, Bravo, History, Discovery, TBS, TNT, TruTV, CNN & FX as well as Canadian TV Everywhere apps like Crave, TSN & Sportsnet.
Want to know the difference between a free, subscription and TV Everywhere streaming service? Check out our breakdown here.
What we get with all of this access from free, paid subscription and TV Everywhere streaming apps is an abundance of on demand content that doesn’t come remotely close to what you can get with cable.
It means we can enjoy a variety of full seasons of older shows and movies as well as the latest episodes of newer shows.
In a year where many of us spent more time in our homes than normal having access to a wide variety of streaming services meant that we had a ton of options.
This year we saw the launch of new services like HBO Max and Peacock and late last year the launch of Disney+ and AppleTV+. There is already a report that Discovery will be launching their own streaming service early next year.
We’ve also seen a major change in the way that many of the major TV and movie studios are approaching streaming due to the pandemic. It started with Disney+ making Mulan available on their streaming service and has continued with HBO Max now about to get Wonder Woman 1984 on Dec 25th, 2020 as well as making all Warner Brothers movies available on HBO Max for a month at the same time when then open in the theatre in 2021.
There were also reports of MGM asking for almost $600 million to bring the latest James Bond movie 'No Time To Die' straight to streaming.
The current Covid pandemic has forced the entertainment business to fundamentally change the way they approach releasing films which is going to increase the acceleration of streaming.
This means that consumers will have more options going forward as studios reorganize their internal operations and start to focus on their existing streaming services.
About Kutko:
Kutko is a Canadian based cord cutting company that offers help to every day Canadians on how to get rid of cable and cut the cord.
If you are interested in cutting the cable cord and not sure where to start then get in touch with us and arrange your free phone consultation today.
Check out some of our other blog posts.
