Streamers must combat ‘subscribe, binge, cancel’ culture

In the face of overwhelming competition in the streaming space, streaming services have their work cut out to re-engage with restless consumers and steer them away from the urge to ‘subscribe, binge, cancel, repeat’.

EY’s recent Decoding the Digital Home survey uncovered a significant portion of consumers (40%) are engaging in this pattern, which increases customer acquisition costs and reduces the average customer lifetime value for streaming platforms.

It makes it very difficult for streaming services to build customer profiles and deliver personalised experiences, with short subscription periods limiting the data available for effective recommendations and targeted marketing.

However, EY says streamers can do a lot to adapt their marketing strategies to help retain subscribers and re-energise restless customers, focusing on content adaptation and customer viewing habits. 

Subscribe Binge Cancel Repeat

35% of UK survey respondents to the Decoding the Digital Home survey say they are interested in reducing how many platforms they pay for. While cost is the key driver for cancelling, content is also a major issue. 

11% said platforms lacking content they previously carried was a reason to cancel, while 10% indicated they were considering cancelling due to a preference for other platforms.

Martyn Whistler, Director in EY’s Media & Entertainment Practice, said: “The key takeaway from our Decoding the Digital Home survey this year is that sense of subscribe-binge-cancel culture, which we’re seeing a lot more. That’s a concern for streaming services for several reasons – the acquisition costs for getting customers on board is appreciably higher if your lifetime of that customer is incredibly short. And particularly if you’re giving them free subscription services and you’re not monetising them in any great way. There might be some advertising revenue coming in, but it’s negligible.”

Added to this, Whistler points out that if customers are only coming onboard for very short periods of time, you don’t build up a detailed profile of information about what that customer wants to watch. 

“It’s all about an integrated user experience and that’s hard to do if you don’t know the customer well because they’re subscribing and they’re jumping off and they’re subscribing again. What we need to see streaming services do is improve the experience for subscribers. Extensive content libraries make these streaming services attractive, but the problem is you’re throwing loads of paint at the wall and hoping some of it sticks,” he explains.

Enhanced Recommendations

The reason customers subscribe to a particular platform in the first place is largely due to its content, according to the Decoding the Digital Home report. 

34% of UK respondents say they wanted access to specific content, while extensive content libraries were a draw for 32% of respondents, and 28% of respondents are brought in through the lure of exclusive content.

Once subscribed, enhancements in recommendation engines, primarily driven by AI, will help ensure subscribers are made aware of the breadth of relevant content they haven’t yet watched in streamers’ libraries. 40% of survey respondents said they would find AI-assisted content management useful. 

Whistler says: “Using AI to improve the recommendation engines is a significant part of what needs to be done. But, when we talk about customer experience, it’s not just down to recommendation engines, it’s also the user interface, which is usually very cluttered and difficult to navigate. The amount of time that people have to spend looking for content is a problem.

“For example, we know sport is incredibly popular, but a large proportion of consumers say they have trouble finding the sport that they’re looking for, so you have to ask, why does it take that long?”

Rewarding Loyalty

Streamers can encourage customers to stay subscribed by improving how they window content, and by looking at new and innovative ways to reward loyalty.

“Retailers are very effective at building loyalty through customer points and rewards, and you don’t get any of that on streaming services,” says Whistler. “However, if you were to incentivise them by creating a loyalty scheme and keeping it open even if they leave, they can rejoin that loyalty scheme and continue to build loyalty if they later return as a subscriber.”

Furthermore, with a loyalty mechanism in place, streaming services can gather information about the subscriber and use it to improve the user experience, along with their recommendation engines. 

Other mechanisms available to increase customer loyalty centre around pricing and marketing. The traditional model is to bring new subscribers in with a free or inexpensive subscription that then goes up to the full price after an initial period. This relatively unsophisticated approach could be improved upon.

Whistler explains: “We see subscribers saying they get a lot of content that they’re not watching, so could you include more of a pay-per-view type model for some premium content? In this way, you could provide an ongoing free or low-cost subscription, but if subscribers want to watch the latest series of X they then have a pay-per-view option to watch it.

“You’re incentivising a transaction there, even if you’re getting them on board for a low cost in the first place. There’s already pay-per-view on streaming services, but the incentive to take those things up is relatively low, given the breadth of content that’s already available on the services.”

Currently, a lot of people subscribe for a certain number of months on a free trial and then when that lapses, they find ways of repeating the cycle. 40% of those taking part in the Decoding the Digital Future survey actively choose to subscribe-watch-cancel-repeat to take advantage of these discounted rates for limited periods. Whistler said: “They’ll use a different email address to subscribe for the next three months so you’re not getting the continuity of the customer”. 

Instead, streamers should look at what they could put in front of subscribers to make them stay – is it another month of free trial, or is it a half price offer? Is it bonus content that they haven’t received before? Streamers need to identify the churn signals from their customers and do their best to mitigate against these.

Marketing in the age of AI

In terms of enhancements to marketing, Vidisha Kanchan, who leads AI strategy and design for telco and media clients at EY Studio+, explains that a good place to start is with the thumbnails associated with each piece of content.

“After watching a popular series in one environment, another platform resurfaced an earlier title for me using imagery linked to that broader viewing context. Even though the connection wasn’t obvious within the show itself, the creative immediately caught my attention. It’s a strong example of how adaptive creative can drive re-engagement, and why cross platform intelligence will be critical to streaming success going forward.”

“Cross platform intelligence means understanding how consumers engage with content across video, social and audio environments, and using those signals to adapt recommendations in real time,” adds Kanchan. “That intelligence can shape everything from the imagery shown to how content is positioned, windowed or described, making discovery feel more relevant and increasing the likelihood of engagement.”

Streamers can make use of AI to improve marketing, utilising data around when viewers join and watch a show, when they drop off, and when they come back in. AI can detect churn signals, such as declining engagement or repeated short-term subscriptions, and respond with targeted offers like bonus content or special pricing to retain users.

Kanchan says: “AI knows I watched three thrillers, one after the other, and then I dropped off and didn’t log back on for a good month. It can do something with that information. I think streaming companies that nail this predictive binge management, and that nail cross-platform intelligence are the ones that are going to be most successful.”

Kanchan argues that these signals can also enable dynamic pricing strategies, increasing the likelihood of conversion. “When an offer reflects my demonstrated interest, I’m much more inclined to subscribe,” she says. “Personalisation has to underpin every message across every channel, otherwise the investment doesn’t deliver return.”

LLM content searches

Kanchan predicts a fundamental reimagining of how audiences discover and experience streaming content, driven by advances in AI. “We are moving away from static, grid-based interfaces toward LLM native experiences that are built around intent,” she says. “Instead of browsing endlessly, consumers will be able to articulate exactly what they are in the mood for, including tone, pacing, commitment and even how they want something to make them feel. The experience will then assemble itself around that request. Discovery will shift from navigating content libraries to having a dialogue with them, fundamentally redefining how value is created for both audiences and platforms.”

Whistler is also critical of the grid-based interface and believes change is long overdue. “Consumers are expected to scroll endlessly, down through multiple rows and sideways across countless options. That can’t be the most efficient way to discover content, and it’s clear the user interface needs to evolve.”

He adds: “What we’re helping clients do is think about that whole process and whether they have a clear view of who their customer is, and if they have all the relevant data points. Once you’ve got those bedrocks in place, you can use automation and agentic AI to market content to those individuals in a way that solves the problem we’ve identified in our study, of customers not being loyal to that platform.”

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Broadcast partnered with EY to create this feature