Which Streaming Service is Right for My Family?

Welcome to Family Policy Matters, an engaging and informative weekly radio show and podcast produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Thank you for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Many families are making the decision to cut the cord and move their TV entertainment to streaming services alone.

Some are doing this in an effort to gain more parental controls at what they hope will be a lower cost. However, there are so many choices of channels to stream. Which to choose? Well, here to offer some perspective and advice for how to evaluate and compare all these options is Melissa Henson, Program Director of the Parents Television and Media Council, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for responsible entertainment. Melissa is the author of a recent report entitled, Dollars and Cents, A Parent's Guide to Streaming Media. Melissa Henson, welcome to Family Policy Matters.

Thank you so much for having me. We'll start off by explaining why you decided to exclusively evaluate streaming platforms and which ones did you decide to include? I think the streaming platforms are still a relatively new phenomenon. Cable television and broadcast television have been around long enough. And I think for most viewers at home, they know what to expect.

They know what the rules are, the boundaries within which they operate. But these streaming services are an entirely new ballgame. And that's why we chose to focus on them. That combined with the fact that we saw in the past year just a huge spike in the number of streaming households in America. And that was accelerated, I think, by COVID.

But things were trending in that direction anyhow. So what we did was we decided to look at some of the most popular streaming services out there by subscriber count. So that would be Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, HBO Max, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, which used to be CBS All Access, Peacock, which is NBC's contribution to the streaming world. Okay, so did you find some economic or non-economic impacts in your report?

Absolutely. In general, what we are seeing is that many families can realize sometimes significant cost savings by switching to streaming services. Although for most households right now, they're still getting their internet bundled with cable and television. And so these streaming services are going to represent an added cost on top of what they're already paying for internet access with their cable bundled in. But whereas five years ago, you could get Netflix or maybe Netflix and Hulu or Netflix and Amazon Prime and be able to access 90 to 99% of the content that you wanted because they were the only streaming services that were really active at that time. But as more companies are entering the marketplace, they're taking back their licensed content that they were making available through Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu in order to stream that content on their own proprietary streaming services. So whereas, as I say, five years ago, you could watch Friends on Netflix. Now, if you want to stream Friends, you have to get HBO Max. Five years ago, if you wanted to stream Frazier, you could do that on Netflix. Now you have to get Paramount. If you wanted to watch a Pixar movie, you could do that on Netflix. Now you have to get Disney Plus. So as more and more companies are entering the marketplace, it's going to necessitate more buying more and more streaming services in order to get access to all the content that you want.

And so the costs are going to escalate pretty quickly. What is your research discovered regarding the trade offs between the quantity and degree of explicit content versus the parental controls available then on these platforms? So I think what parents need to know is that unlike broadcast television, broadcast decency laws do not apply to streaming services. And they're not even really constrained for the most part by advertisers for a couple of reasons. One being that many of these streaming services are not even advertiser supported in the first place. And second of all, the way advertisements work in these streaming environments is entirely different from the way advertising works on broadcast or cable television. So for example, they may give you a choice of ads that you watch.

They may be tying your name or your data, your personal data to your personal consumption habits in order to deliver targeted ads to you. And so your ad viewing experience may be entirely different from my ad viewing experience. And so it's much harder to put pressure on advertisers with respect to content. And so what we're seeing is that there's significantly more mature content on these streaming services. Adult content on Netflix or Amazon Prime is comparable to content that used to only be able to see on like HBO or Cinemax or Showtime. It's important to note too that some of these shows that seem pretty innocent at first can suddenly devolve.

That's right. On the flip side of that, they're not at all bashful about using that TVMA rating. Sometimes on broadcast and cable television, they are reluctant to use that MA rating even when the content warrants it because they're worried about scaring off advertisers. That doesn't seem to be the case on streaming services.

But what that does mean is if you see that TVMA rating, take it seriously because the mature content can be very, very mature. Are there industry standards then for what constitutes, I know you just mentioned that they don't apply necessarily to streaming like they did to broadcast, but are there some standards that we should expect? Right now with streaming services, it's kind of like the Old West.

There's no sheriff in town. There is no streaming industry equivalent of the MPAA. There doesn't seem to be any sort of governance over the streaming industry. And so these streaming services are sort of making up their own minds or deciding for themselves what they're going to do with respect to criminal controls.

When we first looked at streaming services about five years ago, they were all over the map. They do seem to be trending in a similar direction, which is that most of them seem to be using some combination of MPAA ratings and TVOMB ratings. So MPAA would be things like PG, PG-13 and our TVOMB ratings would be PG, TV-14 or TVMA. So they're using a combination of these different rating systems and allowing parents to select sort of their maximum threshold before you have to enter a PIN in order to access that restricted content. So if you have young children in the house, you can set it to PG-13 so that anything rated PG-13 and above, you have to enter a PIN code in order to be able to watch. So that seems to be the general pattern, but it's not universal.

And there are still some major problems in how these systems are applied. So, for example, on Hulu, you don't have that level of granularity. You can create a kid's profile or you have an adult profile. But within the kid's profile, they're lumping everything together. So the stuff that's intended for very young children, like preschool age, is lumped in with stuff that's really meant for teen audiences. So TV-14 or PG-13 stuff is right there with the stuff that's for preschoolers. And so that gives very young children access to sometimes very mature content that's really intended for older teens. So that's a problem. And there's also on Hulu, no barriers to stop a child from switching over to an adult profile.

And that's a significant problem. On the plus side, what we have seen is on Netflix, you do have a slightly greater degree of control in that you're able to block individual titles. So you can add an age restriction, but beyond that, you can also say, but I definitely don't want my child to be able to stream 13 Reasons Why or Cuties or specific titles. Are there any clear winners, do you think? Do you make any recommendations on one streaming service over another?

It really is going to come down to family preferences. So if you have a family with young children, Disney Plus might be the best option for you because they have pretty strong parental controls. But they also don't have an awful lot of inappropriate content to begin with. I mean, it's sort of is designed as a streaming service for families.

So it's probably the best bargain out there. As Netflix loses more and more content back to the original content creators, as those creators start to enter the marketplace, Netflix is going to come to rely more and more heavily on their own original content. I think you're going to find there's less and less of interest to families. They have a pretty large inventory of programming for school age children. But once you're out of that first through sixth grade age range, there's not an awful lot on there that's really suitable for younger teens, older teens, kids between the ages of 10 and 16. There's not an awful lot on Netflix. Is it reasonable, do you think, to expect our broadcasters to be more responsible in the kind of content they provide and how they guard children?

It's absolutely reasonable. I mean, these streaming services really depend on families for their survival. We know from viewing habits surveys that young adults, you know, professionals that are independent, not yet married, not yet with children, what they tend to do is subscribe to a streaming service for a short time, binge watch their favorite episodes or their favorite shows for time and then drop that streaming service. And then maybe the next month, they try out a different streaming service. So they're sort of hopping around. And because there's no significant entry or exit fees associated with the streaming services, there's no contract, no cancellation charges, anything like that.

It's very easy for young adults do this. And this is what they tend to do. So the streaming services are really depending on family subscribers. So I think it's absolutely incumbent on them to make sure that they're serving those families well. Do you have some recommendations then to the streaming industry and to content creators for ways that they can continue to reach these stable users, these families? So what we are calling for, what we are urging is an industry symposium and we are offering a host one ourselves and be a virtual symposium that doesn't have to be in person. But some way of getting all these different players to sit down at a table and agree to best practices, industry-wide standards that they would agree to adhere to, involve the scientific community, involve the academics and researchers that know how this media impacts kids, get all the major players involved and get them to agree to a standard which would be applied across streaming platforms throughout the industry.

That's what we're really hoping will happen. In failing that, I think it's going to be important for an update of the Family Movie Act, for example, that would allow parents better control when it comes to applying filters and blocking technology as an added layer of protection above and beyond the parental controls that are already available. I think it would be important for the FCC to look at how the ratings are applied on the streaming services, make sure that there's a high degree of continuity and consistency in the application of the ratings so that parents can make good and well-informed decisions when it comes to what they watch. So you mentioned 13 Reasons Why, and I think that's a really good example of a series that had a lot of evidence that it was causing some harm to teens.

Are there any other examples that you can think of that really illustrate the need for this kind of coming together to talk about standards? Yeah, well, I mentioned Hulu, which is by far the worst player when it comes to the parental controls. Hulu is also owned by Disney, and so Disney is sort of the Jekyll and Hyde in this story. I mean, on the one hand, they've got Disney Plus, which is generally a pretty family-friendly environment, but then they also have Hulu. And on Hulu, they have a show that's targeted to teens called 10-15, which sounds innocuous enough when I say it out loud, but if you write it down on a piece of paper, you can see the double entendre that's there with the title. It is teen targeted. It's very adult in content. It has some really grossly inappropriate scenes. It's accessible because of the weak parental controls that are available.

So if you set up a kid's profile and you leave your 12 or 13-year-old in the room to watch on the kid's profile, they can switch over to the adult profile and access this program without any trouble whatsoever. Well, we're just about out of time for this week, but before we go, Melissa Henson, where can our listeners go to find a copy of your report, dollars and cents, and also to follow your work? You can find the report at parents.tv.org. Follow us on our social media pages. Just look for the Parents Television and Media Council official page on Facebook and Twitter.

Okay. Melissa Henson with the Parents Television and Media Council. Thank you so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.

Music You've been listening to Family Policy Matters. We hope you enjoyed the program and plan to tune in again next week. To listen to the show online and to learn more about NC Family's work to inform, encourage and inspire families across North Carolina, go to our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. Thanks again for listening and may God bless you and your family. Music