Recently, there has been an explosion in the number of streaming services. With Disney+ recently hitting the markets and many companies, including the BBC hopping on the bandwagon of making their own streaming services, it’s getting harder and harder to find everything one wants in one place. When Netflix first launched in 2011 (2012 in the UK), the main selling point was the number of shows that were on there. Paying £7.99 a month for almost any show you wanted was pretty remarkable. And it was all in once place, with high resolution, no ads and subtitles. It’s no wonder that people have moved away from TV to streaming services. However, companies capitalising on Netflix’s success have been slowing pull their content from Netflix, reducing the amount of great content on Netflix. If you search for a show or movie, you may end up disappointed. If they do have it, it also may be just one season, meaning you’ll have to resort to another streaming service to watch the rest of a show or to watch it at all. Very few people are willing to pay for multiple streaming services monthly. This is part of the reason people will just steam pirated content to watch the content they can’t find on their streaming service of choice.
I conducted a survey of 37 Londoners to discover their opinion on the matter.
Firstly, I asked what streaming services people did use. 73% of people use Netflix, 43.2% of people use Amazon Prime, 16.2% of people use Crunchyroll, 51.4% use BBC iPlayer (likely because it’s free with a TV license), 5.4% use Disney+, 8.1% use Sky Go, 10.8% use US based services (using a VPN), and 5.4% use other services. Unsurprisingly, nobody used no streaming services; everyone used at least 1.
Next I asked if streaming services satisfy everyone’s watching needs, on a scale of 1 to 5. 48.6% of people rated a 3 or under, meaning they were unsatisfied. Only 10.8% of people were completely satisfied with the content on their service of choice.
I then asked how often people turn to piracy to watch shows that they can’t find. Only 24.3% of people never pirated anything. The majority of people stay away from from piracy when they can, due to the risks, only using it when they need to (32.4%). 43.2% of people use it regularly. People prefer to use streaming services because there are no adverts (56.8%) and it is safe and secure (73%). 48.6% of people want to support the show/ movie and 51.4% like the high resolution.
People’s main reason for piracy is that it’s free (59.5%). 45.9% of people simply don’t even enough the money for piracy. 43.2% of people use if because all the content they want is there.
Finally, 83.7% of people believe there are too many streaming services.
Piracy isn’t good, but for many people it’s the only problem. Eventually, this oversaturation will die down, as all trends do. Companies will eventually learn that people are not willing to pay for multiple services.
