I was travelling in April 2022 and had a long flight home to Sydney Australia. The Day before I travel, I had the urge to download Rush and watch it again. At that time, I was subscribed to just about all the streaming services in Australia. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, I was not able to download this on my iPad as I was overseas and hence I watched something which was previously download.
During the flight, I did some mental calculations and thought, I should purchase all the movies that I watch again. I know people who would rather watch something new than watch a movie again. I get that. I calculated the amount that I was spending on streaming services and cancelled two of them after landing in Sydney. This saved me around 30$ a month at that time. This number has only gone up since the streaming services have increased the price over the years.
Since then and today around 18 months or so, I saved none of those dollars. The money that I saved by cancelling those streaming service has been spent on buying Movies and TV Shows in Apple TV. I have actually built a decent library and now I can watch Rush for the 100th time whenever I want.
I understand the concerns that people have that you’re actually not buying those movies but buying a license of that movie and there is a probability that it might be taken away anytime. I trust Apple to make things right in such a case but I would suggest a numbers spreadsheet to track them. I know some people do this and buy Blue-rays, I initially thought to do that buy there is no space in my home to actually store them longterm.
In present day, Our household wanted to watch a movie on Disney Plus — One of the service that I actually cancelled. I looked up the price for the month and compared that to the price of buying the movie on Apple TV. It was cheaper to buy that on Apple TV. This may not be the case at all times of the year. So I bought it watched it and forgot about it.
I know what I am saying is nothing new, there is whole community on Reddit and other places where people follow this philosophy. Cheap Charts is one of those places where you can create a shortlist and the service notifies you when the desired Movie / TV Show is on sale.
At 65 Movies and 18 TV Shows, My experiment has been a success IMO.
Something to consider.
iVikrant 