What the word

I have been keeping a note of every streaming plan I pay for, mostly because I lost track and found I was paying twice for something. One thing that stood out while I was doing it: the word premium appears on about half of them, and it does not appear to mean the same thing twice. So what does it actually buy you? From what I can tell, one of four things. More screens at once This is the most common and the most honest version. The cheaper plan gives you one or two streams, the dearer one gives you four or five. If there are teenagers in the house this is the only tier that matters, and it is worth paying for. Everything else on this list is negotiable. Better picture, sometimes Higher resolution is often locked to the upper tier. Whether you will notice depends entirely on the screen and where you sit. On a forty-three inch television across a normal living room, most people cannot reliably tell. On a sixty-five inch with somebody sitting close, they can. Fewer adverts, or none Straightforward and easy to value. Watch something on the cheap tier for an evening and see how much it annoys you. That is your answer. Absolutely nothing And this is the one to watch. Some services use premium purely as a price tier. Same content, same quality, same everything, with a word in front of it. The way to catch this is to ask a direct question: what does the higher plan include that the lower one does not? If the answer comes back in adjectives rather than numbers, the answer is nothing. I found read more useful for thinking through which of the four you are actually being sold, because the sales pages are not going to tell you. What I ended up doing Downgraded two services to their basic tier, kept one on the higher plan purely for the extra streams, and cancelled one entirely. Net saving about eleven pounds a month, and I have not noticed a single difference except the adverts on one of them. Worth an hour of anybody's time. Most of us signed up years ago and have never looked at what tier we are on since. If you want the consumer-rights side of cancelling and downgrading, Which? covers it properly.