The Streaming Swindle
Are you not entertained… and broke?
The Great Streaming Swindle: From Cutting the Cord to Choking on Subscriptions…
Once upon a time, in a galaxy not so far away (like 2013), streaming services rode in like digital cowboys on pixelated horses, promising to rescue us from the overpriced, 500-channel, nothing-to-watch wasteland that was cable television. "Cut the cord!" they said. "Pay less, watch more!" they chirped.
Fast forward to 2025 and congratulations—your cord is gone, but your wallet has been bled dry by 14 different subscription services, each costing roughly the same as a small Starbucks mortgage.
What was supposed to be a sleek, simple solution has mutated into a bloated beast with more heads than a hydra at a content convention. Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Max, Paramount+, Apple TV+, Peacock, Prime, AMC+, Discovery+—I’m pretty sure there’s one called "CerealTV+" that only streams breakfast commercials. And don’t even get me started on “Freevee,” which sounds like something I made up while hallucinating in a Roku menu.
I don’t have AppleTV+!!!
And the shows? Scattered to the digital winds. Want to watch the new season of That One Show Everyone’s Talking About? Good luck—it's exclusive to DingDongTV+, which only comes bundled with a seven-year data plan and a toothbrush subscription.
So what’s a humble entertainment junkie with a shrinking bank account and a growing resentment to do?
Here’s my strategy: wait for Black Friday like a content scavenger in the post-apocalypse. Every November, I descend upon the digital marketplace with the fury of a thousand remote controls. Discounted bundles? Free trials? “One year of Hulu for the price of one expired sandwich?”—I’ll take it. I hoard streaming access like I’m prepping for Y2K2… or stocking up on toilet paper… covid style.
I can just purchase it, yo!
Right now, thanks to the corporate generosity that only exists once a year when capitalism puts on a Santa hat, I’m streaming with the best of ‘em. I’ve got access to all the majors—my watchlist is so long it might legally qualify as a novel. But let’s be honest. Come November, it’s all going bye-bye.
Because as fun as it is to have infinite entertainment at my fingertips, there’s more to life than turning your brain into a soggy bowl of algorithm soup. Once those Black Friday deals dry up, so do my subscriptions. Boom. Gone. Ghosted like a Tinder date who found out I still use DVDs.
When the digital dust settles, here’s what I’m keeping:
Basic Netflix – for my wife, who enjoys true crime, baking shows, and the occasional documentary about murder and baking.
Basic Peacock – for me, because someone’s got to keep up with reruns of The Office and whatever leftover shows NBC forgot to cancel.
Everything else? Gone. Dead to me. If a prestige drama drops and no one in my household has the app to watch it, does it even really exist?
I’ll be floating away on a stream of physical media, baby. That’s right—DVDs, Blu-rays, and maybe even some crusty VHS tapes I found at a thrift store next to a broken fax machine. They don’t expire, they don’t raise their prices, and they don’t ask me if I’m still watching.
Yes, I’m still watching. But now I’m doing it on my terms. Welcome to the Resistance.
