If I suggest that the golden era of video streaming is over, it implies that there was such an era… and I am not sure I can support that idea. If there was one I likely blinked and missed it.
Instead, I have always been at least vaguely annoyed at the various streaming services over one thing or another, so that they are making me more annoyed now doesn’t mean they were ever good in the first place.
In fact, if we’re going to start calling out “golden eras” in hindsight, I am going to declare the years when Netflix was a DVD by mail service to be such a time. I would argue that the era of the Netflix red envelope represented the absolute peak in access to movies and television.
And, sure, maybe you didn’t like the Netflix DVD service back then. I will admit that I am somewhat biased because I happened to live within spitting distance of one of their distribution centers such that I could drop DVDs off at our local post office on Monday and have the replacements at our home on Wednesday. Our three disk subscription would keep us in videos pretty much constantly… at least until we got a video we never quite got around to watching.
Netflix
Netflix was only part of the ecosystem at the time. It was general era of things being available on physical media. Blockbuster wasn’t healthy, but it wasn’t dead yet either. But movie and television studios were absolutely invested in putting every damn new movie and every season of every semi-popular show out on DVD. It was an integral part of their business strategy. The day a summer blockbuster arrived on disk at retail would get a front page mention in the weekly ad supplement from Walmart and Target and whoever.
You could get your hands on a lot of stuff. As a backdrop to all of that, most of us still had some form of cable or satellite television. Peak broadcast television for me was probably having the DirecTV satellite package with the receiver with the integrated Tivo DVR service. Recorded shows with that 30 second jump button was all you needed.
The problem was all of that required some planning or some patience and we all want something right now dammit! We were also sick and tired of playing for a cable package with a bunch of channels we never watched. There were so many “we need ala carte cable” bad takes at the time by people who didn’t understand how the industry worked.
The promise of streaming was getting what you want, on demand, and not paying for stuff you don’t want.
The greatest trick the devil Netflix ever pulled was convincing all the studios that streaming would make more money than physical media. A little over 19 years ago Netflix introduce a streaming service… I think there was an app for it on the Nintendo DSi at one point… with a limited amount of content as an additional feature for those who subscribed to their DVD service… and it has all been downhill since then.
Netflix on the Nintendo 3DS at least
Now, in 2026 my wife will bring up a show or a movie she has heard about and I will check, then inform her that it is not available on one of the half dozen services to which we subscribe. Or, worse, that it is available as a pay per view… and, honestly, there is almost nothing I find worth dumping between five and twenty dollars to watch a once on the TV. I am totally at odds with that, largely because the streaming services have trained me to not do that.
Streaming in general, and Netflix in particular, has also trained us to consume shows at an unsustainable rate. If a 10 episode season drops we’ll watch two episodes a night and be done before the weekend. And if we really like it, we’ll probably consume it even more quickly. I think we ate up the whole first season of Ted Lasso on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Then we’re stuck for a year or more waiting for the next season… unless Netflix cancels it… and they cancel most everything.
All of which was an excessive preamble to what streaming channels we currently favor.
The Three We Never Leave- Netflix
- Monthly with ads: $9.00
- Monthly no ads: $20.00
- Monthly, no ads, 4K; $27.00
The king of the hill of streaming services, as long as you don’t count YouTube. If you include YouTube and all its user generated content, then Netflix is a distant second. But we’re not going to count YouTube.
Netflix, for all its faults, tries harder than other streaming services. It does so because it has, more than any other service, committed to the bit. Apple, Amazon, Paramount, whoever… they all have other business ventures. If Apple screws up video, they still have iPhones. If Amazon drops video it might not even be visible on their financial statements. Netflix lives or dies on the success of their streaming app.
As such they work harder at their service than pretty much all the other service combined. Or that is the way it feels some days. Their app works better, their algorithm is better, their original productions are tuned specifically to be on a streaming app and not obviously cut so they could be rebroadcast on 70s era cable TV. Even when you watch with ads, they do ads better than any other service. Now, I still can’t stand ads anymore, but Netflix is the least intolerable on that front. It is the attention to little details, like not showing us long intro credits or skipping past the “previously on…” segment if you just watched the previous episode, that other services kind of go, “good enough” and move on is where the Netflix app shines.
But, mostly, they have more content. New stuff drops every week. Lots of stuff. We log in every Friday evening to see what is new. A lot of it is crap… or at least not for us… but there is a lot of stuff.
Furthermore, at some point in late 2024 other services were in a revenue panic and started licensing their shows to Netflix, so if anything on another service is any good there is an even odds chance it will show up on Netflix eventually.
The flip side, of course, is that shows come and go from the service like a revolving door. Any of their productions remain, but anything licensed has a shelf life and is here today, gone tomorrow. They are good at telling you what is leaving soon, but you cannot count on anything sticking around for long.
So, while $20 a month seems steep to me… for the moment at least… the available content on any given day is such that we probably watch more there than other services. That is why it abides while other channels get cancelled.
- Amazon Prime Video
- Monthly with ads: $15.00
- Yearly with ads: $140.00
- Monthly fee to remove ads: $3.00
The fee structure there isn’t full accurate because you cannot subscribe to JUST the video service. It is part of the full Amazon Prime package, which includes free shipping and music and Prime Day deals and what not. We’re subscribed to Amazon Prime for the shipping mostly. My wife stages listings as part of her real estate business, so I end up ordering a lot of odd items to help with that. Since we’re already subscribed we might as well watch it, and if we’re going to watch it I don’t want any damn ads… so I pay the tariff for that, though I might stop.
And I might stop because they don’t have a lot of good new content. There is an interesting series now and then. It is the home of Reacher, for example. It is also the landing spot for movies with a 29% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes. If you want to know where bad sci fi movies go to die, it is Prime Video.
They are also completely wed to the “one episode a week” thing, which feels bizarre because I have to believe NOBODY is subscribing to Amazon Prime just for the video content. It is not worth it. But I guess they want to get that extra three dollars out of me.
Finally, Amazon will never let you forget that they see their real business as a pay per view movie service and a front end to subscribe to every other streaming service. There is an Always Sunny Charlie Day conspiracy theory meme waiting to be made linking together all the cross service subscription plans.
Otherwise their app is okay, their ads are annoying, their suggestion algorithm is the same as the Amazon store front where if you buy a new router they will suggest routers to you until the end of time, and the ability to find things to watch is helped mostly by the limited amount of content available.
In summary, we’re already subscribed to Amazon Prime, so it isn’t going away. But if it was costing me $18 a month on its own I’d drop it and run away like it was Cobalt-60.
- PBS – KQED
- Monthly: $5.00
KQED is my local public television station and I give them $10 a month, which gets me access to the PBS streaming service. I could pay just $5 a month, but I upped that when the administration cut all funding for public broadcasting, something which mostly hurt rural communities which depend on public radio for farming related news and weather reporting. But those communities also voted for Trump, so that was what they wanted I guess; tariffs, high diesel prices, and no locally focused news. Good for them.
The PBS app mostly has whatever is currently being syndicated on PBS plus the archive of PBS funded shows. You can go find episodes of Nova back to the 80s. You can also find most of the Ken Burns documentary series and anything they produced in cooperation with the BBC or whoever, which means if you want Downton Abbey, here is where you find it.
I wish they had some of the older Masterpiece Theater or Mystery shows, but most of those were licensed for a limited showing, so no going back to Jeeves & Wooster or I, Claudius for me.
Technically no ads, which means you have to watch a 2-3 minute ad for Viking cruises before a show, but afterwards there are no interruptions. The app itself is just okay.
Basically, this is for shows I watch when my wife is away for a weekend and I want to watch something from Ken Burns or an old episode of Nova.
The Two that Stick Mostly Stick AroundThen there are the duo of channels that I occasionally cancel, but mostly stick with out of habit.
- Apple TV +/-
- Monthly no ads: $15.00
- Annual no ads: $120.00
Apple’s theme is good shows, bad movies. Seriously. I would argue that there are no good Apple produced films. They tend to be very mid and forgettable, like Greyhound, or goofy and stilted, which includes anything with Marky Mark in it. Some of the goofy stuff can be fun, and even memorable. I enjoyed watching F1 in the theater, for example. It still isn’t a good movie, but I had a good time. Though, counter point, there is that Napoleon movie, which I am sure no normal person has actually sat through and watched without being on their phone most of the time.
So it is the shows, which they drip out one episode at a time and space out in such a way that they all slightly overlap in a completely transparent effort to keep you from unsubscribing, which annoys me. I might not unsubscribe if you offered value for money or had a few more shows or produced a single movie I would watch a second time.
Recently they have started showing other people’s bad movies on the service, and that hasn’t helped. Not as bad as the movies on Amazon, but not good either. And this points to their biggest problem; they are the anti-Netflix who thinks they can get by with a few quality items… but can’t quite hit the quality threshold.
Also, like Amazon, they are also very much in the pay per view business and will occasionally feature a film at the top of the app that I would like to watch only to click on it and find their hand out looking for another $15.
Their app looks better than it functions. When a show is selected, for example, its image in the app grows by about 5 pixels, so unless you just actively selected it I can often not tell what is currently selected. It also isn’t great at finding things or the algorithm or just letting you see the episode list.
Finally I would like Apple and every other app who decides they are going to do the “stay tuned for a look into the episode” thing to give me an obvious way to indicate that I do, in fact, wish to stay tuned. If you touch nothing, or touch the wrong thing Apple concludes you are done and closes off the show and once you figure out how to get back to the episode you have to start again from the beginning and fast forward through everything. I should be able to just jump to that content. I know you desperately want me to know who did the voices for the Bulgarian dub, but I really don’t care.
- Peacock
- Select with ads: $9.00
- Premium with ads: $13.00
- Premium no ads: $19.00
- Annual: Monthly x10
Peacock is the NBC/Universal/Comcast streaming service that is trying to straddle the line between streaming and old fashioned terrestrial cable. So “Select” is basically the ability to watch cable live on a streaming app. We used to get that for free because we’re in a Comcast only internet ghetto so they force us to subscribe to cable… my internet packages is literally twice as much without cable… but Peacock decided “You know what, pay me again!”
So not a fan. They also have a fairly modest app that has all the usual content discovery problems AND even if you go ad free they cut their content so you get a moments pause every time you hit where an ad break would go. I guess this is the implied threat to keep you going with no ads.
So why is this on the list? The trick here is that we bundle this with Apple TV so get Premium with no ads for $7.00 a month, which I am sure isn’t tenable in the long term, but for now this is what keeps Peacock on our list. In a market where everybody thinks they’re now worth $15 a month, $7 looks pretty good.
And they have some decent shows and get some stuff from other services and occasionally have a movie worth watching.
Services That Come and GoNow we’re into the annoyance zone, with services that I occasionally think we’ll stick with, then cancel because they piss me off somehow.
- Disney+ / Hulu
- Monthly with ads: $12.50
- Monthly mostly no ads: $22.00
These two are one and the same now, with Hulu slowly being subsumed into Disney+. Also, you get some form of ESPN with this package, but it is not the version of ESPN that has whatever sport you actually want to watch. Seriously, I do not watch much sports, but I tried this and it is like dealing with John Cleese in the “I want to have an argument” sketch. So it goes.
I remember a time when Disney+ was $9.00 a month and I felt like we would never unsubscribe. Its prime draw is access to the huge library of Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars content. Seems like a win. Also, you have all episodes of The Simpsons available on demand.
In practice I have most of the stuff I would re-watch available on DVD or BluRay at home. And while Hulu has some shows worth watching now and then, plus the back catalog for Archer, Rick and Morty, and Bob’s Burgers… do I need that? Their app is also kind of shit and we’ll be better off when it is all just folded into the Disney+ app.
Disney also keeps doing things that makes me want to unsubscribe. Most recently they announced a price increase AND changed their terms of service to say that the ad free plan can totally have ads when they feel like it. That was too much bullshit for one week, so they’re out for now.
- Paramount+
- Monthly with ads: $9.00
- Monthly no ads: $14.00
Gets you the Star Trek universe, the Taylor Sheridan “Cowboys should be able to murder whoever they want” extended universe, the Showtime library of shows, and whatever CBS is doing right now. What have they even got these days now that 60 Minutes is a complete clown show? Oh, and it is owned by Larry Ellison and the only thing I want to hear out of him is the screams when the AI bubble pops and Oracle has to get parted out to pay the data center debt. Oracle has only survived this long by acquiring competitors to keep making the line go up. The AI thing has the potential to kill the company.
If I liked Star Trek or cowboys murdering people a bit less we might never re-subscribe… but murdering cowboys can be surprisingly compelling.
Will Subscribe for One Season of a Show Then CancelHere are the services that I’ll up for a specific show, but only once that show has completed its season and all episodes are available.
- HBO SuperMax
- Monthly with ads: $11.00
- Monthly no ads: $18.50
- Monthly 4K no ads: $23.00
How the mighty have fallen. Their leadership wants so badly to get back to the Game of Thrones or The Sopranos era. They still manage to put out some interesting things… Hacks was fun, until it wasn’t… but nothing to keep me with them long term. I’ll watch John Oliver on YouTube.
The last time we had it we got the package with ads… and on any new show, it wasn’t so bad. For the final season of Hacks each show was “ad free” after you watched a two minute opening ad… so basically PBS… which wasn’t so bad. But shows or films in the back catalog… well, ads suck in general, but suck more when your algorithm is bad at ad placement. Also, do none of these networks have enough sponsors? I swear I see the same set of ads, or the same ad back to back in the same ad break way too often to convince me that ads are worth the effort.
Oh, and their app is the absolute worst. No other app crashes as often… or at all, really. We bought an upgraded, more powerful Roku last year, in part because I thought maybe our old Roku Stick just wasn’t good enough. But no, the HBO app still crashes.
And there are all the usual discoverability and navigation issues.
Meanwhile, Paramount Skydance EllisonCorp just got approval to buy HBO Warner Discovery Whatever, so maybe it will all be on one service at some future date? Or maybe the black thumb of scary Larry will make everything suck even worse. That is pretty much the history or Oracle; but a competitor and make them worse.
- Starz
- Monthly no ads: $12.00
Starz is the strange third party left over from the premium cable channel era that was dominated by HBO and Showtime. It was a second tier version of those back then, and is something of a second tier service today.
Also, the pricing I have above is the default, but they always have a deal running where you can get in for $5.00 for a month for a while or $30 for a full year or something crazy. You can also find ways to bundle it with other second tier services if you dig around.
It has shows that you don’t get other places… except when they show up on Netflix… just not a lot of them and new stuff does not show up at regular intervals. Their app is pretty basic, but it works. The main problem we have is that we’ll watch a series we like and then… we’re kind of done.
- AMC+
- Monthly with ads: $8.00
- Monthly no ads: $12.00
AMC is/was a prodigious pr