STREAMING AHEAD

BY BARRY FOX

In my opinion, there are now far too many movie and music streaming services, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney, Paramount, Sky’s Now and Mubi for movies, with Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, Apple and Amazon for music.

With spare money getting tighter, market competition is hotting up. Most of the services are now offering assorted free or near-free trials, and special offers like a month’s free viewing on Paramount with a packet of Walkers crisps. You can currently get 3 months or Mubi for just £1. Tesco clubcard vouchers can be used to ‘buy’ three months of Disney.

The offers vary but all have one thing in common. You will need to enter full details of a valid credit card and sign to accept that after the trial period expires, and unless you actively cancel, full charges will automatically kick in. The charges are high, more than a tenner a month for Mubi, so you will need to carefully diary a safe date for cancellation.

Here are some tips, hard-learned from my own mistakes. I once clicked Yes to the offer of a ‘percentage off’ on future online purchases. Stupidly I missed the small print rider that after a grace period I would be automatically charged a monthly fee for the percentage offs. It took a lot of hard graft to get out of that trap.

With most streaming services you can create an online account, with user name, email and password, before starting a subscription and entering credit card details. You can then experiment with free trailers. And expect to receive an enticing stream of special one-time, act-now offers.

Once you have signed, it makes sense to try a dummy run on how-to-cancel well ahead for the due date.

It also pays to check before paying or starting a trial period that your viewing device, which may be a TV, set top box, or plug-in dongle, can actually receive the service you want. Not all devices work with all streaming services.

The quality of Help and Support offered by different streaming services varies widely. Lazy staff may just parrot irrelevant ‘fixes’.

Recently it took around fifteen emails before Paramount Support admitted that the widely sold Sky Now dongle ‘’powered by Roku’’ (i.e. made for Sky by dongle-maker Roku) cannot use the Paramount App.

A quick check now suggests that the Now dongle also cannot get Mubi.

Previously I gave up trying to tell Sky Now Support (and Sky’s management) that some of its Entertainment programmes failed to start or stopped half way through. Currently some of the adverts which come before Now programmes have sound but no picture. As this is a nice bonus rather than a problem, I enjoy not trying to explain it to Sky Now Support.

Moral: don’t commit to a yearly subscription, rather than monthly, until you are sure everything works. And as general guidance, probably the best and cheapest dongle to buy is the most basic Amazon Fire Stick at around £30 – or often less with special offers.

To contact Barry Fox visit www.tekkiepix.com

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