Mobile Streaming services: One of the most nostalgic things about watching the series in the past is the whole family getting together. If there were a show that everyone loved, you’d organize your life around it.
Parents and kids would sit in front of the TV, and you would schedule bathroom breaks when ad rolls came around. This was accompanied by popcorn and ambient lighting, and you’d have some fun commenting on the episode as soon as it was over. Then, you waited for an entire week until a new one aired.
Such family gatherings are a rare occurrence nowadays. Everyone has an account on Netflix, and you can binge-watch an entire season in a single night. Mobile streaming sites have changed the way we consume media. Instead of everyone gathering in front of the TV in the same place at the same time, families can watch the same show in different rooms at different times of the day or week.
Binge watching
Mobile Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and others present you with an impossible choice. All episodes are available, and it’s up to you to watch them when you please. So what do you do?
You spend all night binge-watching episode after episode until you fall asleep or finish the entire show.
From a health standpoint, binge-watching leads to insomnia, exhaustion the next day, and poor sleep quality. TV shows are created with the sole purpose of keeping us on the edge. They end with cliffhangers to force you to keep watching. Binge-watching over-stimulates the brain and doesn’t let you sleep because you want to know what happens next.
From a social standpoint, you often have to blend in with the crowd. When a series becomes too popular, like Tiger King or The Squid Game, you have to watch it. Everyone talks about the new show. All memes are related to it. And all media outlets report on the series.
Influencers often follow the current trends and make changes to their lives. But the practice has spread to almost every social media user.
The cost of content
Mobile Streaming services contain so much content that consuming it all would take you multiple lifetimes. Their libraries are massive, and you often don’t know what to watch.
Every subscriber is overloaded with decision fatigue and the disappearance of monoculture. Your friends watch a new show, and they influence you to start watching it too. Being a carrier of such information can make trendsetters. If someone else listens to your advice, it feels like a bonding experience.
Instead of watching a show because they like it, most people do it because someone recommended it, they saw it trending, or wanted to be a part of the crowd.
Regarding pricing, popular choices like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and HBO are becoming moderately expensive, especially with Netflix cracking down on sharing passwords.
Let’s say you wanted to watch The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon. They were trendy at the same time. You’d have to pay for an Amazon Prime and an HBO subscription, even though you’re watching one show on each platform.
With prices increasing, many people look for alternative ways to watch these shows or find a new source of entertainment. Many will accept watching ads again to enjoy Mobile Streaming services for free. The way we consume media will still change in the future.
The risks of Mobile Streaming
Whenever millions of people use the same digital service, cybercriminals start rubbing their hands. That’s a goldmine of data and money to exploit. Such a case happened in 2021 when over 3 billion accounts got leaked to a hacker forum from places like Yahoo, Gmail, LinkedIn, and Netflix.
But that’s a major breach, and it rarely happens. The bigger problem is individual hacks. It’s easier for a hacker to target you and steal your login credentials or credit card data than to breach your go-to streaming service.
Most people don’t pay much attention to cybersecurity. Weak passwords, connecting to public networks, falling for phishing scams, and visiting shady websites are some of the lousy cybersecurity habits hackers love to exploit to gain control of accounts and devices.
That’s why you should take proactive measures to be on the safe side when using mobile streaming services:
- Use a VPN on your iPhone to encrypt your connections when streaming on public Wi-Fi.
- Instead of using the same password for every account, create a new one, and store it in a password manager. You won’t have to remember all your passwords, and hackers won’t succeed in using one leaked password to access your other accounts.
- Finally, don’t use free streaming sites. Cybercriminals lace these websites with harmful ads and might use them to install malware on your device. You don’t want hackers to drain your bank account just because you want to jump on the trend and watch the newest show for free.
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