Users Once Again Annoyed As Netflix Once Again Raises Prices
from the pay-more-for-less! dept
It’s fairly obvious that Netflix won the first round of the streaming TV wars.
Here’s the thing: as subscriber growth becomes saturated, Netflix has to keep providing Wall Street with those sweet, improved quarterly returns at any cost. To do that they’re going to follow directly on the heels of the cable giants (like Charter and Spectrum) the company once disrupted. That means more and more price hikes, and greater and greater restrictions and annoyances.
That also means lots of corner cutting, a sag in overall quality, weird new nickel-and-diming restrictions (like the company’s crackdown on password sharing), eliminating your cheapest and most popular consumer options to drive them to more expensive products, and just generally pummeling customers with price hikes. Oh, and when you’re really out of ideas, shitty mergers to goose stock valuations.
Netflix this week announced that it’s once again raising prices for its ad-free and ad-based subscriptions. Its standard plan without ads is rising $2.50 — from $15.49 to $18.00 per month. Its cheapest ad-based tier is now $8 per month, up $1. They’re also raising prices on various other things, like the cost of higher-end tiers that allow simultaneous streams, or the cost of adding an extra member to an account.
Just like U.S. cable companies used to do, Netflix insists these price hikes are necessary to continue improving “value” to Netflix subscribers:
“As we continue to invest in programming and deliver more value for our members, we will occasionally ask our members to pay a little more so that we can re-invest to further improve Netflix,” the company said in its quarterly letter to investors. “To that end, we are adjusting prices today across most plans in the U.S., Canada, Portugal and Argentina (which was already factored into the 2025 guidance we provided in October 2024).”
Of course that’s not how Wall Street or enshittification works. Wall Street doesn’t want Netflix doing the things customers and employees actually want: investing in better quality (read: often more expensive) content, paying employees better, improving customer service, or lowering prices. The hunt for impossible, unlimited growth is an entirely extractive, cannibalistic affair. It’s how we got Comcast.
You can operate this way… for a while. Clearly many Netflix customers still see value in what Netflix offers at the price point it offers it. Netflix now has over 300 million subscribers and last quarter saw its revenues jump 16 percent. It saw 18.9 million new subscribers last quarter, up from the 13 million new subscribers it added a quarter earlier.
The major reason for Netflix’s latest growth is its ad-based tiers. The streaming giants want to shift from ad-free subscriptions to ad-based subscriptions because ultimately they can squeeze the consumer with price hikes on one end, while squeezing advertisers with higher ad rates on the other. Double the exploitation potential, double the fun.
But again this only works for so long. Ultimately you push your luck, service quality dips below an acceptable bar, and users increasingly start shifting to competitors, free video services, or piracy. At which point, as per cable industry tradition, executives will blame everybody but themselves for their sharp but avoidable reversal in fortunes. And the whole disruption cycle starts all over again.
Filed Under: ad-based tiers, competition, enshittification, price hikes, streaming, tv, video
Companies: netflix
Comments on “Users Once Again Annoyed As Netflix Once Again Raises Prices”
Shifting to competitors may work for some but for those of us that watch Netflix and other similar streaming services primarily for their original series, we generally can’t watch those shows on competitors’ streaming services which really leaves us the options of continuing to pay them as prices rise, just do without those shows, or periodically subscribe for short periods of time to catch up on shows we missed and then cancel again.
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Or just get an account with IPT and download whatever you want to watch. Sheesh.
From what we can learn from their shareholder letter:
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At least they’re smart enough to realize this and take advantage of it (somewhat). I’ve had no regular access to cable TV since I moved out of my parents’ house for university, 25 years ago, except for Christmas and summer breaks. Two times each year when lots of people had large blocks of time with nothing to do, and the companies could try to make a good impression on these people who’d have money in a few years. Maybe show something they’ll talk about when they return to school; reduce the frequency and annoyingness of commercials, considering people had become unaccustomed to them over several months; do some free previews of the premium channels.
But what did they do? Nothing. Or less than nothing: they’d actually pause their regular programming to show re-runs and filler—particularly around Christmas, with the same movies every year. After 4 years of watching commercial-free TV- and DVD-rips shared between students, and only ever being annoyed and disappointed by TV networks, of course I’d never go back to that. Not for free, and certainly not by subscribing to cable.
More recently, I’ve experienced Netflix and Prime in much the same way—during brief family visits—and what I’ve noticed is that they’re fine to watch something you’ve heard about elsewhere, but absolutely useless for finding anything (far too often, we’ve gotten pretty far into some “suggested” thing that turned out to be bad). Netflix used to show some kind of rating, which was kind of useful, but they’ve long since hidden it. Then Prime showed the IMDb rating for its first year or two, which was a huge advantage over Netflix; and now that’s gone too. And well-known shows and films have been noticeably absent or disappearing from those services.
Apparently there are some sites and apps one can use to find good shows and films, filtered by the streaming services one actually subscribes to. It seems like a pain in the ass compared to torrenting.
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Netflix makes video wallpaper. Crap content churned out on an assembly line with little attention to quality, intended to be half-viewed by someone playing with their phone.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-second-screen-enough-is-netflix-deliberately-dumbing-down-tv-so-people-can-watch-while-scrolling
If someone is a video wallpaper subscriber, they’ll keep paying Netflix’s price hikes because they’re not paying attention to their bills anymore than to Netflix.
Netflix has figured out the key to success in streaming is to find the right customers, not worry about the right content. They want people who are so inattentive to anything that Netflix can make them pay good money for bad content.
Which goes back to that first-mover advantage Netflix had. They entered each territory in the world first and hoovered up all the potential streaming customers. Then the fussy ones churned away and the inattentive zombies stuck around.
Now Netflix competitors get to deal with the fussy Netflix-rejector crowd. They actually want good content, which is expensive and hard to make. And that’s why streaming seems to work only for Netflix, unless you’re Apple and doing something entirely different, not bothering to attract huge numbers of subscribers.
Justwatch is one of those sites where you can locate stuff although when I hear about an interesting new show, I usually also hear about the site that made it, so I use justwatch mainly to track movies.
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That article makes some counter-points too, noting that several writers said they never got any such notes, and that the phenomenon wasn’t really new.
Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I mostly watched TV while eating (I got pretty damn fat) or doing homework. And shows were written with the expectation that people would be missing episodes, tuning it halfway through seasons or episodes, and so on. Long-running plots were rare (excepting “background” plots), and when they happened there’d be lots of recaps, flashbacks, and such.
Seriously, watch any last-millenium sitcom and tell me it demanded much of its viewers. They’d effectively have to tell us when to laugh!
Yeah, a lot of what Netflix makes is crap. That’s only part of their business, and a lot of the stuff they license is crap too. Low royalties, I guess. But isn’t that just Sturgeon’s law? “Ninety percent of everything is crap.”
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“The price hicks seem to be mostly based on dollar inflation…”
Inflation isn’t at 16%. It’s just more fucking GREED.
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It’s a myth that inflation can be reasonably reduced to a single number. The consumer price index is valid for the “average consumer”, who is as fictional as the “average pilot” the U.S. Air Force tried to locate in 1950.
That doesn’t mean an average is not sometimes useful, but in this case we’d have to actually look at the specific inflation being experienced by the “price hicks” such as Netflix. Notably, television and film licensing, for almost everything people want to see, is a monopolistic market due to copyright. Whoever Netfilx is licensing from could well be inflating prices by 20% per year, because why the hell not?
Of course, Netflix is, itself, one the the monopolists in this market. And then there are the wages for film crews, etc., the finances of which I have no idea.
We unsubscribed
I finally got the wife to agree to unsubscribe a couple weeks ago with the last hike. Fortunately torrent sites are still working just fine.
Just another failed business. The stable geniuses are still working out details but it appears that c-suite morons have screwed the pooch again. Film at eleven.
The rinse/repeat cycle says there will be a replacement but that may be a bit delayed due to the recent implementation of of the great replacement theory, in this theory the highly paid worker bees are replaced with indentured servitude foreign workers with limited skills to be trained by their soon to be laid off co workers.
I confess to once trying Netflix for a few days…. but I didn’t inhale.
The cost of streaming.
I am retired. When the cost of traditional cable ran up to $180/month, it no longer fit my budget. Therefore, I canceled cable got some less expensive internet service (we have competition) and got some streaming services. I was able to reduce my “cable” bill by 50%. Now with the recent price hikes I will need to trim streaming subscriptions to stay within my fixed budget. The one or two I will have to cut will be the ones I do not watch often or have very poor content. Ultimately, I will watch nothing but “free” content, and stay that way until I die! My income is fixed! Wish companies would remember that.
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Old Man, get some whippersnapper to explain torrenting to you and you’ll be fine.
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DVDs are also a popular and simple option for retired people. Every thrift store near me is well stocked with players and discs, and my local library has discs too.
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Less and less is being produced on DVD though. If you want something recent that isn’t a big Hollywood blockbuster, you may be out of luck.
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There’s also Blu-ray, though some stuff isn’t even coming out on that. So, yes, someone who wants the very latest stuff will need to pay through the nose for a bunch of streaming subscriptions, or learn how to torrent.
churn de la churn churn
The way to handle this is just to subscribe one service at a time for 1-2 months out of every 12, however long you need to, in order to watch whatever good content they made over the past year. When you’ve run out of good content, cancel and move on.
I’m on Netflix now and struggling to even get to the end of my month because everything I try from them is errant garbage.
The way they’re all making good content with an eyedropper, I don’t think I’ll have trouble sticking to my 1-2 month rule. I’ll have to start building in time periods where I subscribe to nothing because the rate of production of decent material is just too slow. Netflix is 99% crap now and other than Apple, which seems to be increasing its rate of good content, the others are stagnant or degenerating.