The streaming wars dividing America! Where do YOU stand in the debate… are you canceling Hulu, Disney, Peacock and Paramount (keeping just Netflix like Renay) – or signing up to more like Jerry?

It’s the big question that divides Americans: What’s the best way to watch TV at home in 2024?

Whether you’re a die-hard Netflix fan, an Amazon Prime convert, or a stickler for an old-fashioned cable subscription, everyone has his or her ideas about the best (and cheapest) way to ensure your access you have all the shows you need.

Signing up for various streaming platforms was previously considered a cheaper alternative to cable TV.

But as competition has become increasingly fierce in recent years, services have raised their prices, raising questions about whether cord cutting can really save you money. A DailyMail.com analysis from earlier this year found that it now costs households more than $120 a month to subscribe to nine of the leading streaming services.

Have rising prices caused you to cancel all your memberships, or have you taken a tactical approach to reducing costs in your household? We asked our readers to get in touch with their thoughts on the streaming wars.

JERRY – cable to streaming

Jerry Tetro, from Seminole, Florida, had subscribed to cable with spectrum for forty years.

But when baseball season ended last year, he decided to turn to the world of streaming platforms.

“I roughly calculate that I paid them almost $100,000 over about 40 years of cable at Spectrum, and in my last years with them I started having terrible buffering and service problems,” he told DailyMail.com.

The service was so bad, he said, that his neighbors would alert him if their team scored a home run.

Now Jerry subscribes to Roku, Amazon Prime video and Hulu, which he got for $1 a month in a Black Friday deal.

His monthly bill has more than halved, from $307 to about $138.

“I have all the content I need and like to surf around for movies, TV shows and documentaries,” he said. “Spectrum sent me a letter to lure me back with a deal that on the surface seemed to be rock bottom, and after inquiring about what seemed like a better deal to re-sign, it still cost $50 more per month.’

DAVE – shops nearby

Instead of sticking to specific providers, Dave Gooshaw jumps around when memberships offer deals.

“We quit cable TV because of the prices and we won’t pay streaming services the same money – or anything even close to that,” he told DailyMail.com.

“We pick up a provider to watch a particular item if we can’t find it for free, and then drop that provider when we’re done watching.”

‘If they keep raising prices, we will register even less. It doesn’t seem like a good business model to price yourself out of the average household’s pocket, but I can see this happening,” he added.

DEENA – family shares logins

Deena Rae has also developed a tactic to keep costs down in her multi-generational home.

Deena lives with her mother, her two adult sons and her teenage daughter in Houston, Texas.

They all used to have different streaming services, but didn’t share their logins with the rest of the family. But then they decided to cancel all but one service and share logins.

“My mom had Acorn through Prime, I had Hulu, one of my sons had HBO Max and the other had Netflix, and we could watch on all those apps,” she said.

Last year, Netflix made the big change by banning password sharing, officially limiting its platform’s viewership to users living in the same household.

“We recently decided to keep Prime and cancel all but one streaming service and then rotate it,” Deena said. “So, for example, in November one of us subscribed to Max, and we’ll keep it until the end of January and then go to Netflix for 2 months.”

RENAY – canceled them all (except Netflix)

Renay Fitch of Texas has chosen to simply dump her subscriptions to Discovery+, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+ and Peacock.

They’re either too expensive, too laggy, or simply don’t have anything she would like to see, she said.

And she is certainly not alone. Americans are now canceling their subscriptions at a record pace.

More and more Americans are canceling their subscriptions as the monthly costs of key services skyrocket.

In November 2023, the number of dropouts in the eight most important services rose to 6.3 percent. According to the analysis agency, this is an increase compared to 5.1 percent a year earlier Antenna. It showed that a quarter of users have left at least three services in the past two years.

Instead of a suite of services, Renay signed up with Philo – for $25 a month – and kept her Netflix subscription.

And it looks like she might not be the only one who chose to keep their Netflix account.

The service added 13 million new subscribers by the end of 2023, it was announced this week, as the crackdown on password sharing paid off for the company.

That brings Netflix’s total number of subscribers to more than 260 million, making Netflix the most popular streaming service in the world.

The test now will be to see if it can hold on to its fans, even though it has announced that it could increase prices even further.

A standard Netflix subscription currently costs $15.49 per month, and the ad tier costs $6.99 per month – the same price as when it launched in 2022.

But this may not stay that way for long, judging by what the company told investors in its latest shareholder letter.

‘As we invest in and improve Netflix, we occasionally ask our members to pay a little extra to reflect those improvements, which in turn fuels the virtuous flywheel of additional investment to further grow our service improve and grow,” the report said.