Media Consumption & Cost

[Spartan26]

Not to get up all in anyone’s bidness, but how do you consume your media and what approx~ do you pay for them? How much time and what frequency do you access any of the following?

Do you have cable, satellite, AppleTV, Firestick, Roku, etc?

If you have cable or satellite, do you have a more basic or premium added service?

Do you have any potential standalone subscription services like Amazon, Hulu, Disney+, Neflix or the like?

How much do you watch on your TV vs Phone vs Laptop vs Tablet or other?

Do you pay for any complete, out-of-market sports packages like NFL Sunday Ticket or MLB.COM or NBA League Pass, etc?

Do you have any in-theater film subscriptions like the former MoviePass, AMC A-List, Cinemark Movie Club, etc?

Any gaming subscriptions?

Do you have any paid music streaming service like Pandora, Accuradio, Spotify, Apple, etc., without ads?

Do you have any subscriptions to newspapers or magazines like Washington Post, NYT, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, etc?

Any pay news service or industry info guide like Reuters, Bloomberg, IMDB Pro, Studio System, gambling, investing, real estate, medical, or peer reviewed findings or standards?

Are you a member of any FansOnly sites? Any accompaniment access to regular programming, like America’s Test Kitchen, Nickelodeon interactive games, ESPN +?

Am I missing any??

Have you found any at least semi-legal ways to circumvent or curtail costs?

Which of your subscriptions would be the most important to you (and why)?

[Chaselation]

Paying for internet and Youtube people I like and other forms of support. "Locals" is one I like a lot. It has an old school forum vibe.

Yes I still have Netfilx not sure how long that will last.

[djm]

Like everybody in the UK I am forced to pay for the BBC or am not allowed to own a television. In recent years it has become a sad joke of an organisation, that is way to the left of the general public and is a bit of a woke fest. I look forwards to the license fee being abolished, so they can see just how few people will choose to pay for their shamefully anti-Brirish content. There is no television news source in the UK that is not presented through a liberal left filter. The nearest equivalent I can think of in US terms is to imagine you only had Fox News or sources to the right of Fox News in presentation. This is where we are, but with the opposite leaning.

I look forward to Andrew Neils new project GB TV, which I think will balance things out a little better.

Rgegards print media, I choose to subscribe to the Telegraph, the Economist, the Financial Times and the Spectator. For comedy, I read the online Guardian and Independent but I would not pay for them. I can't say I often agree with any of them, but it gives me a handle on what is happening from a variety of perspectives. On a weekend I will pick up a paper copy of either the Sunday Times or the Sunday Telegraph.

Obviously I also read a lot of scientific journals and farming publications. Arable Farmer, Farmers Guardian, Farmers Weekly, Crop Production Magazine, Vegetbale Grower, Fruit Grower, HortiDaily, FloralDaily, Potato Review, Carrot Grower etc etc

[Senseye]

I still have cable and I pay for the basic package plus some general sports channels (but not specialty packages like NFL). I would be tempted to ditch cable, or at least downgrade to the basic package if I was not a sports fan.

I used to have Netflix but it had to go when corporate greed hived off the content into Amazon, Disney, Apple, et. al. I had to counter the corporate greed with consumer greed and go back to black market sources since $15/month or so is cool, but multiples of that are not.

I used to subscribe to the local newspaper for decades, but I cancelled that a couple years back because it had become a ghost of it's former self. Literally one quarter the content and much of it not local any more (obvious cost cutting by the corporate masters). I really miss reading a hard copy paper for 30 mins a day though. It was a routine for me while eating breakfast or during the commute.

[Ferrus]

I haven't read a newspaper for years. I don't tend to read any particular source, I mainly get news from aggregators like Google News which comes from a variety of sources. Probably on the whole I tend to prefer periodical articles like those in the Economist over news articles anyway. I tend to find, baring a few interesting things like the epidemiology of Covid or power politics in the Far East, most news is terribly boring with topics that don't interest me much.

I tend to mainly 'consume' books instead.

[Madrigal]

I really miss reading a hard copy paper for 30 mins a day though. It was a routine for me while eating breakfast or during the commute.

I miss that too, I used to subscribe to the Sunday paper in Argentina. I mostly liked reading the paper at a café though. Back in the day when I had breakfast at a café multiple times a week.

I only subscribe to the NYT (digital edition and Cooking section, I think 20 dollars in total), which I read a lot every day, and Netflix (dunno the cost, a family pack). Well I pay a Marxist paper 50 dollars a month but their access is free so it's more like a donation. From time to time I feel like I absolutely must subscribe to a new paper, but the fact is I don't have that much time to read them. During the height of the pandemic I tried multiple times to subscribe to Le Monde and they kept having website issues. Thinking back, I'm glad it never went through, I doubt that would be daily reading for me. I still might get Corriere della Sera though.

[Spartan26]

Obviously I also read a lot of scientific journals and farming publications. Arable Farmer, Farmers Guardian, Farmers Weekly, Crop Production Magazine, Vegetbale Grower, Fruit Grower, HortiDaily, FloralDaily, Potato Review, Carrot Grower etc etc

Are these journals expensive? I don't know what you do but do you get discounts or get to read them through your job?

[Spartan26]

I would be tempted to ditch cable, or at least downgrade to the basic package if I was not a sports fan.

This is 100% me. I would've cut the cord years ago if not for live sports. Then the pandemic hit and it was my chance! But I re-upped for DirecTV for two years in December, two months before the shutdown. They were giving a whole buncha incentives at Costco and I had been meaning to call to reduce my bill. What I didn't realize was that I was going to lose some channels in package reconfiguration. I liked VH-1 or MTV Classics to see videos at any given hour of the day. I'd record some hour long blocks in case that had reality programming repeats, just so I could kinda watch and veg while I eat. But that's gone. Also lost a channel that had some regional college teams that I like to watch. That really hurt. Especially now as conference tournaments are underway for college hoops. Some of the carriage fees some sports channels are expecting to get is outrageous and insane. Asinine might be a better word. It's such greed and it also flies in the face of conventional wisdom that if prices are too high, producers will lower the cost. Not-uh. Not really a Dodgers fan or Lakers fan but a couple of years ago, Doyers are making a pennant run and LeBron comes out and yet through this mouth-open-in-sheer-lunacy-astonishment $20 Billion with a B, broadcast rights deal comes through yet they way over charged what they think they're going to get. Thankfully most providers rejected the rate. But then only 1 out of 4 homes in LA can see two of the biggest historic draws in the country.

Getting off topic here but DirecTV still hasn't made a deal to carry the Pac-12 Network. Right in the middle of USC & UCLA country, not to mention all the transplants from other repped schools who come here and they can't get on TV in their own yard. So now it's a domino effect, blue chip athletes are leaving the state and the programs are declining. But, and a huge but, the governor signed a bill allowing student athletes to earn money off their name and likeness. We'll see how much that changes the entire fabric of college sports.

Anyway, I might actually try MLB.com. I've watched games through Amazon and even though it was on someone's TV, it just wasn't the same quality as broadcast. When I had cable years ago and if I'd purchase the NHL Center Ice package, they'd leave the channels open throughout the baseball season. If I bought the baseball package, they'd leave the channels open for hockey. I wasn't factoring it in when purchasing but it did make the decision far more appealing in retrospect.

[Spartan26]

A little over a year ago I said Netflix was one more rate hike away from me dumping them. They raised their prices two months ago and yet I'm still with them. I thought around 2016/17 that their next price increase would be accompanied by a cheaper, ad-supported option. Looks like HBO Max will be next up to hop on that train. Meanwhile, Netflix is going to start busting people sharing their passwords.

[djm]

Obviously I also read a lot of scientific journals and farming publications. Arable Farmer, Farmers Guardian, Farmers Weekly, Crop Production Magazine, Vegetbale Grower, Fruit Grower, HortiDaily, FloralDaily, Potato Review, Carrot Grower etc etc

Are these journals expensive? I don't know what you do but do you get discounts or get to read them through your job?

Scientific journals can be very expensive if you not an academic at a university. Even universities are constantly reducing journal access to save money, which is a roadblock to science. If you want a subscription to all the major science journal publishers (Springer, Elsevier etc) then it costs tens of thousands a year. This is why most research is done by indentured academics and large corporates. I am neither, so must pay or find ways to get access that I will not go into but usually involve having some sort of university connection. For many years I lectured part-time or had honorary research fellowships for instance.

There is a change occurring though, with more and more open access journals. I publish all my own research open access as I believe in it, but there are issues around this too. It costs money and time to properly peer review and publish journals, and there is a whole industry now around 'predatory journals' where the authors pay a publication and the scrutiny of peer review is not what it should be. There are lists out there of them that academics must look out for lest they publish in one. What constitutes a predatory journal though is debated.

The EU now insists that papers published from projects it funds are open access, but there are multiple ways to do this. The authors can pay a fee to a traditional journal to make it open access (thousands of pounds) and a lot of tax money goes on this as academics want to go in journals with high impact factor to get their stats up. Some journals allow a different format to be placed on a portal like Research Gate, so people do not get to read the 'branded journal' but still get to access the research. Some allow a pre-print (prior to peer review version as submitted) to publish on a portal.

Then there are truly free, properly peer-reviewed open access journals. These rely on funding from somewhere (usually the university at which they are based), and time given by the editorial team. Peer reviewers do not get paid by any journals so no cost there. I like these and use them, but generally, they do not have high impact factors and are therefore not as prestigious.

The growers periodicals I read would be expensive cumulatively if I paid the sticker price, but most of them mil me a copy for free as I contribute articles every now and then.