That's what I've been thinking too.
I'm pretty sure it won't take long before the month-to-month model will be abolished and a 12-month minimum model will be the only option.
If that's the case, I have a stack of books I've been wanting to read, and a couple of parks I've been wanting to walk. I'm well passed the age of needing to watch anything.
For us, the calculus is a bit different. There's a TON of content our kid digs on D+, and while I gather I'm in the minority of commenters here, I've enjoyed all the Marvel and Star Wars shows, so I've gotten my money's worth from Disney. (Also I got it at a steep discount early on, then got an additional free year, so I'm still coasting on that.)
The. Majority. Of. The. Herd. Doesn't. Care.
All they want is content.
Good, bad, doesn't matter.
Millions have the TV on in the background just to have something on. Millions more regularly watch content they don't even like.
The vast vast majority of the herd will live off crackers and cheeze whiz before they abandon television. Cable or streaming.
Absolutely correct, and gets back to my point. The reason the services do this is
because they can. They know there's a market for their stuff, and they know people will pay for it. And ultimately, that's fine. You wanna watch cheap? Cool, here's our ad-based service. You want the ads gone? No problem! Here's the ad-free service at an upcharge. Take your pick. They've likely priced out everything so that, either way, if you subscribe they make their money.
I doubt we'll see any anti-trust lawsuits come down the pike on this stuff either, given that there's enough channels out there that are each separately owned to be in competition with each other. And as long as they don't actually collude to fix prices, this just becomes "the going rate" for these kinds of services. That's how our economic system is ultimately supposed to work.
For years I've been trying to convince my wife to ditch cable and only keep internet service.
The only time I watch "traditional" TV is when there's a local event and the local news is covering it. Wild fires nearby? Local news is on it. And even that is something we don't need cable for anyway.
We cut the cable about a year ago. Realized we hadn't actually turned on the cable box in a year and a half, and watched everything streaming anyways. So, we cut the cord, kept internet, and now treat streaming services as a la carte options. If I like what I'm getting, I pay for it. If I stop liking it, I ditch it. I still end up watching and enjoying enough stuff on each service I have that I'm pretty satisfied, and it's not actually more than I was paying with crappy cable anyway, so I figure I'm getting my money's worth. Better still, I'm actually consuming it instead of just burning money on 400 channels of garbage "HD" music streams, and garbage stations like History, TLC, Discovery, and the other reality TV outlets that used to actually offer interesting, informative content.