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Patrick O’Rourke is XDA’s News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint’s Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the national technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He’s based in Toronto.

Over the past 15 years, he’s written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more.

Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University.

I’ve never had any interest in subscribing to traditional cable and have always been a cord cutter.

In the early 2000s, I went from using TVersity (a program that no longer exists) and an external hard drive connected to my Toshiba Satellite laptop full of totally legally acquired TV shows and movies, and my Xbox 360 hooked up to a TV, to streaming with XMBC (now Kodi), and eventually, Plex, a few years later. Fast-forward to a couple of years after that, and I mostly dropped the whole home media server thing entirely when streaming became more prevalent and Netflix wasn’t the only player in the space.

After all, the best way to combat piracy is with convenience and a reasonably cheap price tag, and for a long time, that’s exactly what streaming apps like Netflix, Disney+, Prime, and more offered, until prices slowly started to creep up, and stringent account restrictions appeared.

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Subscribing to multiple platforms quickly adds up

Over the past few years, the value streamers offer has rapidly eroded, particularly if you want to watch TV shows and movies in 4K with no ads. This has resulted in me dropping several platforms from my streaming setup. Running through just a few services I’ve subscribed to, Netflix, for example, now costs $25 per month, Disney+ costs $19 a month, HBO Max costs $23 per month, and Apple TV+ costs $13 per month. If I switch to the Disney+ with Hulu and HBO Max bundle, it’s priced at $33 a month, which saves me a bit of money, but bundles can also get confusing, and making sure I’m not somehow accidentally subscribing to a platform twice, is key.

Sure, I could also drop to the ad-supported tier for at least some streaming platforms, particularly Netflix and Disney+, but I’ve lived my entire adult life without watching commercials, and I’m not about to go back now. And this doesn’t even include the wild world of streaming live sports, which pushes the cost up even more. At that point, a mid-level cable subscription starts to look far more attractive than it did a few years ago.

There are ways to circumvent these blocks, but they’re often finicky, and after a long day, the last thing I want to do is not actually be able to watch my favorite episode of The Sopranos on HBO Max.

When you add up the price of all of these platforms, the cost quickly gets very high. This led me to adopt a new strategy where I only subscribe to an app when there’s actually something I want to watch on it. With Apple TV+, I subscribed for season 2 of Severance and season 2 of The Foundation, and then swiftly canceled. I’ve done the same with Disney+ and Andor season 2 and several movies, and I subscribe to Paramount+ whenever a new season of an awful Taylor Sheridan show drops (I really enjoy Mayor of Kingstown, even though I know it’s actually not great – sometimes bad TV can be good), which costs $13 a month. Netflix used to be the platform I always kept around, despite the quality of its content dropping considerably over the past few years, but after the most recent Premium tier price hike, I canceled my subscription and haven’t looked back since.

Account sharing has also slowly gone away. First it was Netflix, and then Disney+ followed suit, blocking subscribers from easily sharing their accounts with friends and family. There are ways to circumvent these blocks (and sometimes you can just fall through the cracks), but they’re often finicky and don’t always work, and after a long day, the last thing I want to do is not actually be able to watch my favorite episode of The Sopranos on HBO Max. I just want to sit down, press play, and have everything work.

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The ability to move between streaming subscriptions is one of the few remaining advantages streaming offers over cable

For this to work, you really need to stay on top of what you’re paying for

At this point in the streaming landscape, the ability to cancel and then resubscribe when there’s something you actually want to watch, is one of the few advantages beyond content that separates streamers from a more traditional cable subscription, but this can also be more difficult than it might initially seem. I often forget to cancel a service within the correct timeframe, or a new TV show or movie drops, and I decide to keep the app for a few extra weeks, forcing another monthly fee to hit my credit card.

I’ve tried managing my subscriptions with a simple spreadsheet, but I still find that at some point, I eventually slip up. I miss the days when I didn’t need to think about streaming platforms in this way and could easily afford to keep them all because the monthly cost was reasonable.

All of this has me thinking that it might be time to jump back into the world of self-hosting with a Plex or Jellyfin server...

So where does this leave my streaming app menu? For now, I’ve culled it to just a few apps that are part of specific bundles. First off, I subscribe to Apple TV+ all the time because I’m able to access it through Family Sharing thanks to my brother’s Apple One plan (don’t worry, I pay him back with access to another app), and at least for now, I’ve kept my Paramount+ subscription since there’s a lot of content on the streamer that I’m currently watching. I also still have Prime Video because it comes included with my Amazon subscription, which makes it far easier to justify, though it does have ads on certain content. Every other platform, including more expensive options like Netflix and Disney+, I’ve axed.

All of this has me thinking it might be time to jump back into the world of self-hosting with Plex or Jellyfin coupled with a NAS. As much as I appreciate the convenience of streaming, the cost continues to climb, and as my life becomes increasingly busy, and I’m watching far less content than I used to, the ability to relatively easily cancel and resubscribe to various streaming apps is quickly becoming a nuisance I just don’t want to deal with.

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Jellyfin gets a new desktop app with updated features

The self-hosting media platform’s server has also been updated