How To Choose A Streaming Service

I can’t count how many hundreds of articles I’ve read about streaming services in recent years, yet surprisingly few consider the topic of choosing which services to subscribe to. The question proved more complex than I expected. For me, it turned out to be not just about what I want to watch, but also what I can afford to watch and whether I can ethically support the companies providing these services.

This piece grew out of something decidedly unglamorous: personal budgeting. Since exiting Cartoon Brew, I’ve had to track my expenses more closely and it’s pushed me to take a harder look at my spending habits, including subscriptions that I once wouldn’t have given a second thought.

I no longer have a work-related incentive to subscribe to any service, so I’ve had to ask myself some tough questions. Like, what services was I paying for, why was I paying for it, and do the companies deserve my money? It soon became clear that few of the services justified their monthly charges on my bank statement.

The product

My tastes run broadly across films, series, and shorts, but lately I’ve been partial to films. I’ve watched around 70 of them in the last 70 days, which is far more than I used to watch when I was running Cartoon Brew. Ironically, spending your time writing about the entertainment industry prevents you from actually consuming entertainment.

A few recent titles I’ve watched.

So here’s the first thing I learned: if you care about film across the full span of cinema history, you’re an extremely niche consumer. Streaming services aren’t actually designed for people who enjoy film. Many of the services have meager libraries of vintage film titles. Peacock, which owns the Universal Pictures library, currently offers just 41 films (out of thousands they own) produced between 1930 and 1990. Netflix, which licenses content from everywhere, isn’t much better, with 87 titles produced during the same period.

If you like to go on film kicks, for example, diving into movies by one director, featuring a particular actor, or rooted in a particular genre, you soon discover that the stuff you want to watch is scattered across countless streaming services. Streamers do a poor job of categorizing titles and search functions are often unreliable, so finding a title often requires detective work on third-party tools like JustWatch.

Streaming was touted as Hollywood’s replacement for physical media, but as a viewing experience, the product is markedly weaker. Bonus content that used to be a part of physical media, like commentaries, video essays, and behind the scenes content, has been largely stripped away from streaming. The simple act of pausing a film to study a frame is now an exercise in frustration because the screen grays out or switches to an advertisement. New tools that might encourage deeper engagement, like curated playlists or sharing features that are common on music apps, are nonexistent on these services. Streamers have shown little interest in building features that reward curiosity, foster community, or give viewers reasons to return to a particular service. Is anyone really surprised that churn rates for video services run three to four times higher than audio streaming?

The cost

A half-baked product is only part of the story. There’s also the cost, which seems to creep upward every few months. Streaming companies are betting that most consumers won’t notice these regular price hikes. The average U.S. household spends $69 monthly on streaming services, up from $48 two years ago, according to recent data from Deloitte. Another study found that nearly one-quarter of Americans spend over $100 per month on streaming. I personally can’t imagine shelling out that much for streaming so I’ve capped my budget at $35 per month.

The ownership

The final part of the streaming service decision-making calculus is a desire for ethical entertainment consumption. Such considerations are more common among consumers of music, where users care about how artists are compensated by those services, but it’s rarely discussed in film and tv circles where a handful of companies control the majority of content. Given the concentration of ownership and distribution in the industry, there are few ethical solutions short of avoiding entertainment altogether. Since I’m not ready to give it all up yet, the second best option is to pay careful attention to who runs these companies and decide where my own red lines are.

Where I ended up

With these considerations in mind, I pared down my streaming choices to three paid platforms: HBO Max ($15.40 per month based on an annual subscription), Criterion Channel ($8.33 per month), and Eternal Family ($8.33 per month). With the addition of a couple of free services — Tubi and Kanopy — this setup offers a rich, nearly limitless selection of titles for about a dollar a day. (I also have a free subscription to Netflix through my wife’s telecom provider, but I seldom find anything that draws me in.)

So, why did I choose these specific services?

HBO Max’s key strength isn’t film, ironic considering they own the legendary Warner Bros. and MGM libraries. But sometimes you just want to watch a series, and HBO’s offerings like Duster, The Chair Company, DTF St. Louis, and The Righteous Gemstones have a winning blend of quirkiness, originality, and bingeability. Some recent releases like Somebody Somewhere and Common Side Effects rank among my favorite series of all time. I’ve also used the service to catch up on established classics like Mad Men. That said, if the Ellisons take over, I’m out. As I mentioned earlier, everyone draws their lines differently, and for me, the Ellisons are that line. While there are plenty of people in Hollywood whose politics and business practices I abhor, the Ellisons belong to the much smaller category of people I regard as genuinely dangerous and destructive to society.

Criterion Channel is the obvious choice for cinephiles and I imagine many others reading this are also subscribers. The platform’s standout feature is its thoughtful human-curated collections, as opposed to the random algorithmic recommendations on other platforms. Admittedly, I often discover films through Criterion’s “leaving soon” category and simply watch whatever is on its way out, but even that feature is a thoughtful addition that most other platforms don’t offer. It’s owned by reclusive billionaire Steve Rales who was once accused of trying to run over his former wife with a car, which on the billionaires’ scale of evil (see the Ellisons above) feels quaint and old-school.

The wild card in this line-up is Eternal Family, a service my wife introduced me to and one we’ve both come to love for its assertive curation. When we need something surprising or weird to get our creative juices flowing, there’s a good chance of discovering it here. Eternal Family distinguishes itself through a significant library of vintage Eastern European films, including animated shorts, which are often an afterthought on other platforms. I suspect some of that has to do with the fact that the service was founded by animator Cole Kush. It’s the only streaming company that I genuinely feel good about supporting.

I supplement these services with two free services: Tubi and Kanopy.

Tubi is the place for populist filmmaking — exploitation, grindhouse, cult, B-movies — in all its tawdry and titillating splendor. I often feel like I learn more about filmmaking and storytelling from these imperfectly made movies than I do from the polished fare on Criterion. Then again, with over 7,800 vintage titles on Tubi, more than any other streamer, exploration is well rewarded. One of my favorite ways to use Tubi is to pick a year on Justwatch and spend a week or two exploring films from that period. Viewer beware, though: not only is Tubi littered with ads (the mute button gets a nice workout with this service) but it’s owned by the parasitic Murdoch clan, not to mention that the company’s CEO is the notorious Anjali Sud, who hollowed out Vimeo as an indie filmmaker’s platform before failing her way into this role. Guilt-free streaming this ain’t. But Tubi also illustrates the central dilemma of modern streaming: sometimes the service with the best library is owned by the grossest humans imaginable. I look forward to the day when another platform offers a library as robust as theirs.

Kanopy, free with a library card at many larger public library systems, is a hugely underrated gem, packed with hard-to-find contemporary documentaries, indie features, and maybe the rarest thing of all: educational content. There’s a strong focus on the humanities, with loads of documentaries about artists, writers, and cultural and social movements. It’s also a fine resource for animated features, both classic and contemporary, including Fehérlófia, Habfürdö, Memoir of a Snail, My Life as a Zucchini, The Wolf House, Boy and the World, Our Sound, and Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles. It’s one of countless holdings belonging to private equity giant KKR, which besides being involved in leveraged buyouts that gutted iconic brands like Toys “R” Us, has also been the subject of boycotts in Europe over its operation of companies in occupied Palestine.

So there you have it: what began as a mundane budgeting exercise turned into a surprisingly complicated negotiation between what I wanted to watch, what I could afford to watch, and whether I could ethically support the companies providing these services. The fact that so much thought has to go into something as simple as watching a movie suggests there’s something deeply wrong with the way Hollywood has chosen to distribute its films. For the time being, Hollywood continues its march toward enshittification: more service bundles, more ads, higher prices, and more fragmentation. I’ve figured out my own system and I’ll keep paying $35 per month, but I’m convinced that in the not so distant future we’ll look back at this era of streaming clutter and chaos and wonder what the hell Hollywood was thinking.

Keep the discussion going in the comments. I’m curious how others decide which services are worth paying for, how much you spend monthly, and which services you subscribe to.