The Luxury of Less: What media brands need to know about choice deprivation

“Friction-maxxing” is already on course to be the word of the year since The Cut coined it to describe the practice of deliberately reintroducing effort into a life that technology has relentlessly automated. Recommendations include ditching ChatGPT and buying a cook book for your recipe inspiration, swapping the quick fix of kids’ screen time for the ‘effort’ of reading with them, and doing puzzles and games without looking up the answer. This type of sentiment runs parallel to the new analogue age. eBay reported iPod searches increasing more than 1,200 times per hour globally across 2025. Luxury fashion brands have designed analogue hardware as status symbols, like Miu Miu’s custom walkman for its SS26 collection.

Choice deprivation as the new luxury

But for all the discourse about friction-maxxing, it diagnoses the symptom rather than the cause. The real driver is something more specific: the active deprivation of choice. People are not just adding friction – they are deliberately narrowing their options, because infinite choice has become a source of exhaustion rather than freedom. Barry Schwartz called this the “paradox of choice” two decades ago. The market is finally pricing it in.

Audiences are not deliberately depriving themselves of choice because they have to, but because they want to. The person reaching for BFI Player over Netflix. The commuter swapping Spotify’s 100-million-track library for an iPod loaded with 400 songs they already love. These are not acts of deprivation in the traditional sense. They are acts of wilful constraint, and increasingly, of status.

The person who chooses an iPod over Spotify is removing the cognitive load of 100 million decisions. The person who subscribes to MUBI instead of Prime Video is outsourcing the burden of choice to someone with taste and judgment – and finding that the constraint itself is the relief. It’s worth noting that this is, for now, a privileged position to be in. The freedom to want less requires the security to know you’re not missing out.

Curation is chic

The craving for analogue habits – and the cultural cache that comes with them in a digital-first world – is a paradox in itself. But it’s also a dynamic that media companies need to take seriously. The audiences leading this shift are disproportionately the tastemakers whose behaviours and sentiments cause ripple effects into the mainstream.

The platforms serving these audiences are reaping the benefits of understanding the decision-making processes of leading-edge consumers. MUBI hit a record 1.7 million subscribers in Q1 2026, built entirely on editorial curation over algorithmic recommendation. BFI Player – expanding internationally, with Ireland, Canada, and Australia among territories being considered – has outwardly courted those seeking a solution to choice overload, dubbing itself “an antidote to the algorithm.” These platforms win not on scale, but on the confidence they instill in their subscribers: someone with credible taste already did the choosing.

Choice deprivation is an asset to be leveraged, even a luxury. But how do media brands take this understanding and put it into practice?

Implications for brands

Reframe scarcity as a proposition, not a problem. Audiences increasingly experience the infinite library as cognitive overload, not freedom. Platforms that narrow, edit, and commit to a point of view are gaining cultural ground with the subscribers that are shaping tomorrow’s tastes.

Invest in editorial confidence. The likes of MUBI, Criterion, and BFI Player put forward a clear proposition to their subscribers: we chose this, and we chose it for you. For larger platforms, that means treating curation as a genuine product – a voice, not just an engine. Spotlighting the collections of tastemakers, talent, or even other subscribers helps to position a service as curated and designed around human taste.

Read the tastemaker pipeline, and get ahead of it. BFI Player’s “antidote to the algorithm” positioning is not an arthouse niche, it’s an early signal of a much wider audience conversation about the exhaustion of choice. Platforms would do well to audit how their most culturally influential subscribers are actually using their service: are they curating, rewatching, and sharing deliberately chosen titles, or disengaging? Understanding the behavioural patterns of selective users now is how you design for the mainstream later. The instinct to want less is moving downstream. The question is whether your product is ready to meet it.