About 40 percent of Americans have cut back on streaming services in the last three months because of financial concerns, according to a recent report

About 40% of Americans have cut back on streaming services in the last three months because of financial concerns, according to a recent report

Americans are quitting subscription streaming services in droves as the cost of living continues to climb, a recent report has found.

Streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu have become increasingly popular in recent years, but Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends report, released late last month, shows how Americans are getting frustrated over the cost to have their favorite movies and TV shows at the click of a button.

“As the cost of everyday essentials like food and housing remain high, many consumers are reevaluating their budgets and cutting back on nonessential expenditures,” Deloitte said in its survey results. “At the same time, prices for media and entertainment services continue to climb.”

  • djdarren@piefed.socialEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    I’ve got an ffmpeg script saved on my Mac which re-encodes video to a fraction of its original size without any apparent loss of quality. Shit’s basically magic.

    I have one for audio as well, but I think it’s an Apple-only MP4 codec, that requires you to have to manually build it into ffmpeg on any other platform. But the end result is that my 2 hour radio show AIFFs that start out at 4GB end up being high quality MP4 at around 75mb.

    Like I said, magic.

    • cmbabul@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 days ago

      Do you happen to remember where you got it? I’ve got a Mac and while the idea of going through all the media files on my servers to convert them I twitch a little bit, but would also love to cut down space without giving up some of my files

      • djdarren@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Pretty sure it’s this command;

        ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 output.mp4

        On my M2 Air, conversions are usually pretty quick, depending on the size of the input. After a short while it does throttle because there’s no fan, but it counters along nicely.

        As for audio; I use XLD, set to encode HE-AAC at 80kbps. It seems really low, but still sounds great.