I think Netflix has finally convinced me to drop them for a few months.
Yeah I signed back up with Netflix to watch something so I could talk to my brother about it, I forget what, and I found they'd purged my entire account. Just everything gone. Prior to that I'd be subscribed with no-more than a few months break for over two decades. And Netflix just decided "Nah, we can just delete all that".
So I contacted their support to see if there was any way to fix that, and they were like "Well, we have a policy where if you unsubscribe for more than 24 months we delete everything", and I was like, okay, but I didn't, because I only unsubscribed last year. And then they were like "Oh well actually was 12 months last year, we changed it recently" (and it does indeed say on the site 24 months, but I kinda suspect it's always said that). So I checked carefully and I'd only unsubscribed for like 9.5 months. So I pointed this out, and they were like "Oh err actually err last year it was 10 months!" and I was like "It's still less!" and they had to do some creative calendar-ing to try and come up with a reason why 9.5 > 10 but apparently they were satisfied with their somewhat fanciful math, so continued to insist it was 10 months, even though couldn't explain why they'd said 12, or support this with any documentation.
It kind of didn't really matter because for whatever reason they'd decided that unsubscribing was apparently account death for me, and they weren't going to fix it, so I told them to re-cancel me and give my money back, which they did, but probably only because UK law requires it (or is about to, and they changed policies in advance of that).
So I don't think I'll be using Netflix for a while yet, if ever. Especially they keep on insisting on increasingly ludicrous price rises, like $18.99/month if you want 4K, which was a high standard 10 years ago, but is absolutely the basic standard they should be broadcast in, in 2026.
There's nothing particularly exciting on Netflix as far as I can tell either - they're gradually lost all their non-original back catalogue to other streaming services, and most of their originals are either utter rubbish (all their movies, for example), or cancelled after 1-2 seasons and then often removed from Netflix entirely.
I've had Disney or Apple TV instead and frankly I haven't missed Netflix. I notice on Justwatch's UK site only about 2 out of the top 50 searched shows (which does seem to correlate pretty well with hype/viewership) are actually Netflix. Prime, Apple, Disney and even the good old BBC are doing a lot better than that. Hell even HBO which only started here a couple of weeks ago is doing better than that.
What have I watched lately?
The Pitt - Excellent, everyone knows this. A lot better than ER was, honestly, and I was a serious ER fan.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms - It was good, I was a little disappointed it did ultimately go for some of the same grimdark shenanigans after seeming to veer away from that initially.
For All Mankind S5 - Oh god the old make-up and teenagers are bit too generically teenage without having any real motivations for those behaviours shown. Someone online said they were "reinventing DS9 from first principles" and it does kind of seem that way (appropriate enough given the showrunner I guess).
Invincible S4 - Still pretty good, still the writers inexplicably trying to come up with nonsensical banana peels to throw in the way of Invincible's relationship with his GF, but w/e I guess.
Daemons of the Shadow Realm - New anime from the Full Metal Alchemist lady, very promising, just as FMA was (and I would say FMA, or certainly FMA:B fulfilled that promise as an anime).
