EXPERT TIPS FOR CHEAPER STREAMING
Downgrade your Netflix subscription
If you love watching Netflix, but are trying to reduce your monthly expenses, you can save over £100 a year by downgrading your subscription. Currently, the most expensive Netflix plan, Premium, costs £15.99 per month (£191.88 a year), but unless you regularly watch content at 4K Ultra HD quality, or your family streams to four different devices at once, it’s a waste of money.
A Standard subscription, which supports Full HD (1080p) streaming to two devices, now costs £10.99 a month (£131.88 a year), but a Basic plan offering HD (720p) quality on one device at a time will be enough for many people and costs just £6.99 a month (£83.88 a year).
To further slash the cost of Netflix to only £4.99 per month (£59.88 a year), you can switch to its new ‘Basic with adverts’ plan (see screenshot above right), which launched on 3 November (www. snipca.com/43947). This shows ads before and during shows and films, each lasting between 15 and 30 seconds, and totalling four to five minutes per hour.
Annoyingly, due to “licensing restrictions”, the new plan doesn’t give you access to the full Netflix library and removes the option to download content to watch offline in the service’s desktop and mobile apps. Also, it’s not yet clear if your viewing data will be shared with advertisers to target you with relevant ads. You may decide those caveats justify sticking with the standard Basic plan, rather than save £2 a month.
Switch between free streaming trials
Many paid-for streaming services offer free trials, which means you can sign up to watch a particular TV series or film, then cancel before you get charged. The catch is that you usually need to provide your payment details upfront, so you’ll need to remember to opt out before the trial ends.
Amazon Prime Video offers the most generous free trial of 30 days (www. snipca.com/43892), but this is only available to new Prime members or those who cancelled their subscription over a year ago. Otherwise, you can retry the service for a week for 99p. As we explained in Issue 636 (page 49), it’s now easier to cancel Prime to avoid being charged £8.99 once the trial is up.
Apple TV+ and Paramount+ both offer seven-day free trials to new users, after which they cost £6.99 per month, and you can also try Britbox (see screenshot below left) and Lionsgate+ for free for a week before paying £5.99 a month.
You won’t generally be offered another free trial after cancelling, but you could try signing up using a different email address.
Share your streaming subscriptions
Netflix has started clamping down on users who share their passwords with friends, but it’s happy for you to share your account, and split the cost of your subscription, with people who live with you. Simply create a separate profile for each person by clicking Add Profile (see screenshot above right) on the Manage Profiles page (www.snipca.com/43897). You can have up to five profiles but remember that the Netflix Basic plan only lets one user stream at a time.
You can share the content and cost of Prime Video via Amazon Household (www.snipca.com/43898), which lets you add another adult (and up to four children) to your Prime account. You don’t need to live at the same address, but you must use the same payment method for purchases above the cost of the subscription.
Similarly, Apple lets you share your Apple TV+ account with up to five family members – even if they don’t live with you – through its Family Sharing feature (www.snipca.com/43899).
Pretend to cancel your subscription
With so much competition in the Tv-streaming market, some services are so determined to keep your custom they’ll offer you a discount when you try to cancel your subscription. Now TV, for example, is known to slash the price of its Entertainment membership from £9.99 to £6.99 a month (see screenshot below)
for six months, if you go through its cancellation process, specify that you can’t afford the service and ignore its pleas to stay, before stopping short of the final step. You should also check the Offers section – at the time of writing, we were quoted £15 for three months of Now Cinema, which would usually cost £30.
Similarly, earlier this year, Britbox offered us three months of viewing for £5.99 (in total) when we ended our free trial. If a service lets you cancel without mentioning a discount, you can easily restart your membership.
Discover what’s coming soon to your streaming service
Once you’ve watched all the TV shows and films that interest you on a streaming service, it’s useful to know what new content will be added soon. This will help you decide whether to cancel your subscription if nothing appeals to you, and resubscribe when there’s good stuff coming up.
Netflix has a hidden ‘New on Netflix’ section at www.snipca.com/43901 that highlights upcoming films, series and specials, and tells you when to expect them. You can also view this information by tapping ‘New & Hot’ in the Netflix mobile app and selecting Coming Soon (see screenshot left).
Disney+ previews forthcoming films and shows at www.snipca.com/43902, while Britbox has a list of new (though mainly old) content at www.snipca. com/43903. It’s also worth bookmarking our sister website What To Watch (www. whattowatch.com) for details of what’s coming up on all the main streaming services.
Watch out for Tv-streaming discounts
You can sometimes cut the cost of a streaming subscription using a time-limited discount from another company. For example, Tesco is letting Clubcard holders exchange £8 of Clubcard vouchers for a three-month Disney+ subscription, worth £24. The offer is available to both new and existing Disney+ members, and is available until 10 August 2023 – see www.snipca.com/43905 for details.
O2 customers can save £2 per month on their Disney+ membership for six months – reducing the cost to £5.99 – by adding the Disney+ Extra to their accounts (www.snipca.com/43906).
Walkers is tempting snack lovers with a month’s free trial (rather than the standard seven days) to Paramount+ when you buy a promotional pack of Walkers Max, Sensations, Wotsits, Quavers, Monster Munch or Squares crisps. The promotion, which requires entering a code found on the pack (see screenshot above) runs until the end of the year – find out more at www.snipca.com/43907.
If you’re quick, until 2 December you can get two free months of Apple TV+ at www.snipca.com/43908. The offer is available to new and returning Apple TV+ customers.