About 40% of Americans have cut back on streaming services in the last three months because of financial concerns, according to a recent report
Americans are quitting subscription streaming services in droves as the cost of living continues to climb, a recent report has found.
Streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu have become increasingly popular in recent years, but Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends report, released late last month, shows how Americans are getting frustrated over the cost to have their favorite movies and TV shows at the click of a button.
“As the cost of everyday essentials like food and housing remain high, many consumers are reevaluating their budgets and cutting back on nonessential expenditures,” Deloitte said in its survey results. “At the same time, prices for media and entertainment services continue to climb.”
Not all hero’s wear capes
In the process of shifting my entire iCloud photo library over to Immich, I’ve discovered that a huge amount of the videos I’ve shot over the years with various iPhones are ridiculously huge x264 .MOVs. So I’ve been fiddling about with ffmpeg this morning, and have landed upon this script that re-encodes them to around 10% of their original size with no visible loss of quality, and retains EXIF metadata. One video I have is 90 seconds long, and is of bats filmed at twilight over a large pond in the New Forest. The original is 132mb, but because most of the clip is basically black, it’s been able to compress it to 2mb. Which is mad.
Anyway.
Navigate your terminal to a folder that contains a bunch of videos and paste this in, then sit back and let ffmpeg work its magic:
for i in *.MOV; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 -movflags use_metadata_tags "${i%.*}.mp4"; doneFor just the odd one or two videos, here’s the basic ffmpeg command:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 -movflags use_metadata_tags ouput.mp4God, I love ffmpeg.