Let's start with the fact that I’ve never watched less TV in my life. My wife Ashley and I recently went through all of our content subscriptions to see what we’re really paying for and what we actually watch.
We've had Netflix for several years. First with the DVD service and then adding the streaming service. The reason why we kept the DVD service when we added streaming a couple of years ago was the content selection. The bottom line was that the streaming library was only a fraction of the DVD library at the time. I went through that exercise again with Netflix to see if there really was a point to keeping the DVD service. Turns out, absolutely yes. In fact, if there was just one Netflix service we would keep, it’d be the DVD service.
If you do a side-by-side comparison with titles, you’ll notice the difference pretty quickly. According to industry experts, there are fewer than 6,000 titles between movies and TV shows combined available through the streaming service. Meanwhile, the DVD service is around 100,000 titles.
We also went through the DirecTV exercise and it was pretty incredible. When we first moved into our home seven years ago, we signed up for one of the top DirectTV packages. Turns out a lot has changed in seven years aside from our TV viewing habits. Going through our package we discovered dozens of stations we never watch and I kid you not there were well over a dozen we never even heard of! We were literally able to cut our package in half without cutting out a channel either of us could even remember watching. So, if you’ve been in set it and forget it mode you may very well be in a similar situation. By the time we were done finding a package that made sense, we’re saving about $100 a month over what we’d been doing.
Just some information if you’ve been wondering or will be tempted to go through this exercise.
Photo by: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Netflix