Cancelling Netflix and Spotify

Mary and I cancelled Netflix and Spotify a few weeks ago due to lack of use.

Disney+ was never going to get renewed, again due to lack of use. We’ve found that on our relatively old Samsung TV, the Disney+ app is almost unusably slow and buggy. I’d blame the old hardware but all the other apps work alright, Disney+ is just terrible for some reason.

Mary uses Spotify a lot more than me so it may well be worth her setting up a subscription just for herself, but I hardly listen to any music these days and when I do I have a feeling that a lot of it could be found on Soundcloud for free anyway.

Netflix does get some use but we’re suffering from there being too much on there and not enough of it being any good. Perhaps if something we’re particularly interested in gets a new series we’ll subscribe again just for that, but I doubt it.

There’s something nice about trimming down a bit. Mary and I are very lucky, we don’t need to make this change for financial reasons but saving some money for something we’re not getting enough value from seems like a no-brainer.

We’re keeping Amazon Prime due to the free shipping. The video and music services are largely terrible, in fact I find the discoverability of the Prime Video app to be some of the worst. At least we’ll get Clarkson’s Farm next year 🚜.

This change does make me reconsider if I should bite the bullet and treat myself to YouTube Premium due to the amount of time I use it. It’s Google though so it’s a hard sell for me to throw money at it even if I do like a lot of creators on that platform, perhaps Patreon is another option to support those I really appreciate more directly?