With the season of colder weather coming, so too is the season of TV show binge watching. As college students, the only thing getting most of us through our classes is the prospect of getting to watch a few episodes of “The Office” afterwards. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu are the most popular streaming services used today.
As far as costs go, Amazon can seem the most overwhelming. In order to get Prime Video, users have to purchase the whole Amazon Prime subscription. This can cost either $10.99 a month or if you choose to be charged annually, it will be $99. Fortunately for poor college students, they do offer a student discount of $49 a year or $5.49 a month. On the plus side of all of this, users get the whole Amazon Prime shopping experience as well, and they do offer the first month free.
Netflix is the most common. It differs from the other services pricing-wise due to the fact that it has different tiers: the basic plan, the standard plan, and the premium plan. The basic plan is $7.99 a month, the standard $10.99, and the premium $11.99. Sadly enough for Netflix customers, the company decided to increase costs of subscriptions in the beginning of October.
This is based on the fact that Netflix is creating more and more original content. Another factor of the rise is that the costs for the rights to content are steadily increasing and have been for a couple years now. Netflix costs will increase only a few dollars but this can still feel like a major blow to customers.
Gabbi Lee, sophomore, said that her mom pays for Netflix, but they use it so often that the price change does not matter for them. This seems to be the case for many other students as well.
If the price increase does matter to you like first-year Becca Barravechia who said that she would end her subscription if the prices raised more than a few dollars, keep in mind that Netflix will not be increasing the price of their basic plan.
Hulu is the second most popular service, following closely behind Netflix. It features more TV shows than movies which is partly the reason they introduced Hulu with Live TV, a feature that offers live and on demand channels. The regular Hulu membership costs $5.99 a month for a year (after this the price rises to $7.99), and the Live TV costs $39.99 a month.
Some speculate that this low price along with Netflix’s price increase will bring more people over to Hulu. This idea seems more and more likely, with Netflix dropping heavily popular TV shows (“One Tree Hill” and “Friday Night Lights”) and movies (“Titanic” and “The Shining”), while Hulu is working on getting the contracts to bring them in. In order to compete with Netflix even more, Hulu is also adding shows that come highly requested by both users of Netflix and Hulu like “Boy Meets World,” “Smallville,” and “30 Rock.”
