Like many Canadians subject to COVID-19 related restrictions, Suzan Lorenz has spent a lot of time watching online streaming services during the pandemic.

Where once she made do with just Netflix, with three kids under one roof, she finds herself subscribing to more services than she originally anticipated when she cut her cable cord several years ago.

“You end up paying for more and more and more things,” she said in an interview. “It increases the spectrum of who you’re paying to access.”

Lorenz says she hasn’t done the math on what she’s paying for three streaming services every month or compared that to her old cable bill.

“I probably should,” she said. “And I’ll be shocked to realize that I should probably just pay the damn cable companies.

“We’re all being had a little bit.”

She’s not the only one starting to think so.

After more than a decade of double-digit growth, subscription additions at Netflix are slowing, the company revealed in its quarterly earnings this week.

The fourth quarter is typically the best one of the year for the company that basically invented online streaming. And while its total number of paying customers around the world grew from close to 214 million people in the third quarter to just shy of 222 million, that figure fell well short of analyst expectations.

Even worse, Netflix said it is on track to add just 2.5 million new customers in the next three months, far fewer than the four million it added in the same period a year ago.

Slowing growth was too much for investors, who sold the company’s shares heavily on Friday, pushing the price down by 20 per cent. For John Lynch, chief investment officer for Comerica Wealth Management, the reason for the sell-off is obvious: “If everybody already has Netflix, it’s hard to improve subscriber growth.” 

No wonder the company raised its prices in the U.S. and Canada again this week. Its costs for new content are going up, and it can’t pay for it simply by finding new customers.

Mature market

If free services and those based on user-generated content are included, there are hundreds of streaming services now available, Jon Giegengack with Hub Entertainment Research told CBC News in an interview. 

“People’s adoption was already expanding at a pretty rapid rate, and then, the pandemic struck and kept everybody locked up in their homes with a lot of time to kill,” he said.

Giegengack says the typical consumer now pays for video content from up to six different sources. As recently as 2018, it was half that.

“The number of sources per person has really risen dramatically since the pandemic started,” he said.

While the industry was growing swiftly before the pandemic and throughout it, it is showing signs of maturing. 

“The reality is that the streaming market has become saturated” wrote Mike Proulx, vice-president of research for Forrester. “This translates to more choice for consumers, who are growing concerned with the aggregate costs of their streaming subscriptions.”

For some consumers, keeping a lid on rising costs means being choosy about what to sign up for — and for how long. 

“Usually, we’ll have one at a time,” Andrew Hiscock of Mt. Pearl, N.L., said. “We have [Netflix] for a few months, watch what we’re gonna watch, maybe use Crave for a couple of months, then go get Amazon Prime, that sort of thing. We’re not usually paying for more than one at a time.”

Others say despite higher prices, streaming is still a good value.

Torontonian Syed Raza uses a half dozen streaming services, and even at roughly $50 a month, he says it’s still a better bang for his buck than cable.

“The biggest advantage of streaming is on-demand content, and that is something that always sucked about cable — that you had to watch something on the network’s schedule, and you couldn’t watch it as many times as you wanted,” he told CBC News in an email. 

“The price for watching everything was never gonna be $10 a month forever. I don’t know why consumers were gullible enough to believe that.”

More than just costs

While costs are becoming a deterrent, consumers also now face the problem of being overwhelmed by the number of options and a complicated system to figure out how to watch them.

Giegengack says his favourite show, Yellowstone, is an excellent example of an increasingly common problem. The program about a ranching family is the most popular show on U.S. linear television right now, and the latest episodes air on the Paramount Network, which is owned by ViacomCBS.

“But Viacom sold the streaming rights to Peacock,” he says, referring to the streaming service owned by Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal. 

So in the U.S., the current season airs on a CBS-affiliated channel while the back catalog is on an NBC-affiliated service, “and you can’t watch it at all on Paramount+, which is Viacom’s streaming service,” he said.

To add to the confusion, all four seasons of the show air on Amazon Prime in Canada.

“Something has to happen to simplify this for people,” he said.

Giegengack says making a hit show used to be the hard part, but making it available for consumers is now becoming just as tricky. And conversely, despite having access to more quality content than ever, the biggest problem facing consumers today is finding a way to use streaming services “in such a way that they’re getting their money’s worth out of them all,” he said.

“That’s hard to do when … there’s still only 24 hours a day to watch them.”

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