Tom's Guide streaming survey shows the average person is now paying over $60 a month — and more than half are using this free service
Swap your bloated cable package for Netflix, maybe Hulu, and suddenly you were saving hundreds of dollars a year. Fast-forward to 2026 and... well, things have changed.Every major studio now has its own streaming platform. Hit shows are scattered across half a dozen services.
- ▪Swap your bloated cable package for Netflix, maybe Hulu, and suddenly you were saving hundreds of dollars a year.
- ▪Fast-forward to 2026 and... well, things have changed.Every major studio now has its own streaming platform.
- ▪Hit shows are scattered across half a dozen services.
Tom's Guide files mainly under tech. We currently carry 939 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Tom's Guide |
| Canonical URL | https://www.tomsguide.com/entertainment/streaming/toms-guide-streaming-survey-shows-the-average-person-is-now-paying-over-usd60-a-month-and-more-than-half-are-using-this-free-service |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Jul 2026 06:30:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-28T06:40:03.643Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-28T06:40:03.643Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Z5WHJiekl3Ti · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Entertainment Streaming Tom's Guide streaming survey shows the average person is now paying over $60 a month — and more than half are using this free service News By Kelly Woo Published 28 July 2026 If you subscribe to more than 7 streaming services, you are far from alone When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Tom's Guide; Shutterstock) Copy link Facebook X Reddit Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Not that long ago, cutting the cord felt like a financial no-brainer. Swap your bloated cable package for Netflix, maybe Hulu, and suddenly you were saving hundreds of dollars a year. Fast-forward to 2026 and...
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Tom's Guide.
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