Netflix is Starting To Phase Out Its Cheapest Ad-Free Plan (theverge.com) 74
Netflix is following through on its plan to phase out its cheapest ad-free tier for existing subscribers. From a report: As spotted in numerous posts on Reddit, Netflix is now asking some basic plan subscribers to choose a new plan to stay subscribed to Netflix. One Reddit user received a notification on their Netflix app, saying "Your last day to watch Netflix is July 13th. Choose a new plan to keep watching." Subscribers paying $11.99 / month for the basic plan will have to choose either the $6.99 ad-supported tier, the $15.49 ad-free tier, or the $22.99 ad-free 4K premium plan.
I guess I made the right choice (Score:2)
I canceled netflix a couple years ago and haven't missed it. Watched it less than Prime Video.
Re:I guess I made the right choice (Score:4, Insightful)
With a few exceptions, Prime Video now seems to be all ads all the time.
Re:I guess I made the right choice (Score:5, Informative)
I guess I made the right choice by canceling Prime and to stop using Amazon at the start of this year.
Seriously. I'm getting tired of everything getting worse.
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Ditto. The only reason I kept Prime was Prime video... and now they want me to pay for Prime AND pay to see fewer ads.
I have an event in my calendar to cancel Prime just before it's scheduled to renew in the fall. Then I'm out.
Re: I guess I made the right choice (Score:5, Informative)
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Cancelled my Amazon Prime subscription last night.
Saved me nearly $400/yr to NOT see "Buy or Rent" on almost every decent movie on the service that MIGHT be worth watching.
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Same same. I have to imagine they are seeing the same things we are anecdotally. Makes me wonder what the internal situation is like. So I looked at their quarterlies, they are going like gangbusters. $2.332b in net income last quarter. Above the last two years' average, by about say 10%. Their revenue has been inching up. So apparently, cancellations are not running above their price hikes. Wonder how long that lasts.
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So apparently, cancellations are not running above their price hikes. Wonder how long that lasts.
One of the more interesting questions adjacent to this is how many people are 'shielded' from the price hikes. My cell carrier has my Netflix bill baked into my cell bill, so unless my cell bill increases, that doesn't actually hit my pocket.
If Netflix's price bumps are eaten by cell carriers and ISPs, then it's really only a subset of end users that are paying more in practice. On the flip side, if I leave my carrier and Netflix along with it, then does Netflix's cancellation numbers reflect that as it sho
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T-Mobile recently reduced the value of their long included Netflix benefit. Verizon has likewise discontinued the plans that included various streaming services while raising prices on the subscribers that still cling to those grandfathered plans. The cellular industry has very little incentive to compete on price, now that it's a mature market dominated by a triolopy, and there's less than zero chance they're going to absorb these price hikes for the benefit of Hollywood's bottom line. You can fully exp
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I've had Disney+ & Hulu free from Verizon. I got in on that shortly before they changed their plans. I haven't had any price increases. I've actually had loyalty discounts added to my account without asking for it.
The newer plans don't include Disney+ anymore, but the base plan is slightly cheaper than what I'm on, and they offer discounted Disney+ & Hulu. Still a net win for new subscribers.
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I haven't had any price increases. I've actually had loyalty discounts added to my account without asking for it.
The price hikes were across the board for the 5G Get More/Do More plans, which AFAIK were the only plans Verizon ever offered that included streaming perks. They also started listing the "value" of the perk on the bill, e.g., Disney Bundle, $18.99, with the price crossed out. I read this as setting themselves up for the future when they'll pass along some portion of the charge. I don't begrudge them for not wanting to pad Hollywood's bottom line but the plan they want people to switch to also negates a l
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I'm on Play More. It's got the Disney+ Bundle as a perk. That plan is no longer offered to new customers.
The closest of the current plans is Unlimited Plus. The same tier costs $4 less a month than I'm paying now, but does not include Disney+. You can add Disney+ to that plan for $10/month.
or the fact they off-shored their formerly award winning customer service.
I've been dealing with Verizon for about 20 years now and every time I've had to deal with support, it's been a complete nightmare. It always takes many calls, with each one usually being at least an hour, to resolve anyt
Re: I guess I made the right choice (Score:2)
More likely the price the carrier paid is already set by cross-promotional contract.
Single stream plan with 4k (Score:3)
I still want a $10 plan with only one stream and 4k content.
Re: Single stream plan with 4k (Score:2)
Now that they cut off sharing, 1 stream is marginally different from 50 for most users.
Attrition is going to kill the stock price (Score:5, Interesting)
"Your last day to watch Netflix is July 13th."
As someone on the plan that they are discontinuing, yes, that is likely correct. For single-person households, the current Netflix plans (two screens) make no sense. "Upgrading" to a higher plan gives me zero meaningful advantage over the current plan, so the only options that really make sense are dropping service or consolidate my accounts with someone else's account and paying the extra fee for a second household. Both of those options represent a net loss for Netflix compared with continuing to pay the $11.99. As for me, I'm probably going to consolidate with my mom's account. I'll get better picture quality (not that I care) *and* pay less every month.
Whoops. Epic fail.
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with someone else's account and paying the extra fee for a second household
This is /. Build your Mom a VPN appliance and route all of her streaming traffic through your connection. I'm only half-joking. I did exactly this for my disabled Mom on a fixed income after the steamers decided to nickel and dime out us out of all the benefits (e.g., password sharing) they spent years encouraging us to enjoy. You can do it for the cost of a Raspberry Pi. It may not work for devices (e.g., iPads) with built in GPS, but it works great for streaming appliances and Smart TVs that rely on
Re: Attrition is going to kill the stock price (Score:2)
Deny the app location privileges?
It'd be great if you could alternatively (without hacks) set a default location to always give that specific app.
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Most streaming apps will refuse to run in that scenario. They will likewise refuse to run if they detect a rooted device. The hack is to use a PC/browser or a streaming device without built in location functionality. Bonus points if you can hardwire it and deny them the ability to do Wi-Fi location.
Re: Attrition is going to kill the stock price (Score:1)
On an iOS device, you cannot stop functionality for refusing to give up your privacy. Sure it is possible on Android, but Apple explicitly forbids it for apps on their App Store. EU citizens may no longer enjoy that privacy protection though as Netflix and co can now opt to go outside the App Store without penalty.
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This is /. Build your Mom a VPN appliance and route all of her streaming traffic through your connection. I.
Actually, this being /. everyone should just pirate everything.
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VPN costs less per month than any individual streaming service/plan. It's not instant enjoyment, but anything popular is a few minutes to download. Then you have the added benefit to keep it as long as you have sufficient NAS storage...none of the "sorry that's no longer available" garbage.
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Piracy works for me. It does not work for Mom unless I want to be her human TV Guide.
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Yup, keep stealing because you're entitled to the product, then wonder why so little gets produced.
Video Entertainment (Score:5, Funny)
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This article just reminds me that I'm still subscribed to Netflix and I can't quite remember how many months it's been since I last watched anything on their service.
Re: Video Entertainment (Score:2)
Learned the joy of being irrelevant a few years ago. My life is so much more relaxed now. This may trigger a few that hate the attitude. Whatever you throw at me I probably can counter, but it would take some time to banter and in the end... It will be irrelevant. Cheers!
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All the steaming companies are moving the same way (Score:5, Informative)
Re:All the steaming companies are moving the same (Score:4, Interesting)
We stopped watching Prime with their single 15-second ad. A few months later we looked at one show and a minute and a half of ads at the start and another ad-break midway through the 30-minute episode was required. Once the ad break started both of us were "fsck this" and dumped it. Prime itself is of little value where we live, so we might cancel altogether.
Then we looked at Hulu because my sister had been talking about a show there. Watched one episode at the free ad-supported trial phase and we both similarly decided that it just wasn't worth the ads, and the $18/month asking price was just stupid given the limited things of interest to us.
We haven't watched AppleTV in a month or two, but the same issue of lack of depth makes it a fairly poor value.
In the end we might rotate between a couple different services, but we aren't paying for something with ads, (we aren't watching it most likely either), and our budget is about $20/month total. For the ~20 hours of television we watch a month that is where the value proposition ends.
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Yeah.. I don't know about Netflix; the value of their service has dropped majorly, and it keeps on decreasing every other month; at this point I would just about rather buy physical DVDs in bulk.
The only thing I should want a monthly service for would be Live broadcasts such as local news networks.
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> The only thing I should want a monthly service for would be Live broadcasts such as local news networks.
Such as free to air local TV?
Re: All the steaming companies are moving the same (Score:2)
Payba little extra for no commercials. Prime also has "freevee" aka old school tv with ads. This is not a replacement for their included stuff, but a different offered service, like BBC America or Paramount, which you can also buy through them. You do not have to watch "freevee", but it's no skin off your ass either way.
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What is the minimum amount of content we need to deliver in the ad stream before people leave?
There is no amount of content that will make ad watching a worthwhile activity. A better method of monetizing or go broke. I refuse to waste the limited time I have on this Earth to sit and watch someone try to sell me something that I don't need, will never need, and simply do not even care about.
I noticed when I was younger that the products most advertised on TV were all ripoffs and they needed to advertise in order to get people to buy their shit. (don't forget to include $5.99 in shipping and handling!
Terminated my account because of this (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not paying to watch ads.
There are no additional features of the higher end plan I can even use.
Good bye Netflix, hello competition.
The joys of being a Gen-X'r (Score:5, Interesting)
The joys of being a Gen-X'r:
* We don't generally care about "getting it nao nao nao." 3 days from now is fine. So's a week. Unelss it's a critical part needed to get car / house / washer / dryer / whatever back in running order.
* This lack of "I want it nao nao nao" -- let's call it Delayed Gratification -- comes from growing up when mail order would take weeks to arrrive. If not months. It lets us live happily without streaming. it lets us live happily without a whole raft of other "pressures" apparently affecting the two later generations.
* Gen-X'rs, because of this, tend to treasure physical books, blu-rays, etc, as a tangible piece of evidence of the thing / show / book we like. A library full of records, tapes, books, DVD, blu-rays, etc is a reassuring place. There's a reason in school I pretty much always was found in the library, if I didn't have to be in class.
Streaming for Convenience, Physical for Posterity / Permanance.
IOTW, Streaming is for Suckers.
I"m thorougly enjoying all the streaming services slitting each other's throats -- and their own -- in the process of enshittifying what was once a decent, good concept.
I'll just sit over here watching my ancient anime and old films, while the post-physical world continues to be made shittier and shittier by greedy corporations and the useful idiots who pump them full of cash.
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I'm sorry but your post is horseshit. You specifically may have those traits but they do not define a generation, any generation. GenXers where the original target market for the mobile pay to win architecture popularised precisely because (unlike your assertion) there's plenty of people in your generation that do want something nao nao nao. GenXers also largely stopped buying physical stuff. I don't know a single GenXer who reads and doesn't have a kindle. I know plenty who gave up on Blurays and who have
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Well, this is actually why i have cancelled Netflix long ago - there waa so little of interest to me, I might just as well buy the blurays.
Streaming has little breadth (Score:2)
You're limited to only the things in their service at the moment. Movies and show leave the service all the time--replaced by new stuff, sure, but still that other stuff is gone.
When Netflix still shipped had physical DVDs & BluRays, the selection was SOOOO much broader than any stream.
Dropped Netflix the moment they stopped supporting discs, as the streams were barely trickles in terms of available selections.
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I'm on the border between X and millennial, and if it is a "virtual" only product, it isn't real to me. I understand that I "buy" games on Steam only in the sense that I license them. I actually own the games that are single-player on physical media.
Books that I intend to read through maybe once for entertainment and never again, I do digital when it is cheaper, but anything I care about I get as a physical copy. Same with music and movies. We have hundreds of music CDs.
I also don't get the concept of peopl
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yep, "* This lack of "I want it nao nao nao" -- let's call it Delayed Gratification -- comes from growing up when mail order would take weeks to arrrive. If not months. " that was 6-8 weeks for shipping and handling, then it would show up 3- 4 months later and you'd be happy it arrived so quickly.
Amen.
I ordered some art supplies in February that only showed up this week. I knew they were made in small batches and they shipped as they were made, so it was nothing to know that it could be a long time until they showed up. It's quite a moment when something you've long-since forgotten about buying suddenly shows up, like Christmas in July! :)
Ironically, same experience buying technical books through Manning. With their MEAP thing you can buy books that are still being edited or completed, often at a gr
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Gen x here. I stream because physical media isn't worth the shelf space it occupies. I hate the clutter and cleaning that comes with collecting.
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I've taken all my CDs, DVDs, and Blurays out of their containers, recycled the containers, and stored the discs in big binders; takes up much less space (the binders I use store 300-400 discs, IIRC).
I've also ripped all the CDs so I can listen to them on whatever device I've got handy. Not going to bother with the DVDs and Blurays, I think.
I love having access to movies and shows that aren't available on streaming, or that are $5 - $20 to rent because studios are greedy.
Diminishing returns (Score:3)
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When streaming services launched and had broad coverage for reasonable prices without commercials ... it was a better product than even piracy in most cases. Certainly simpler for grandma to use.
They've come full circle now where it's trivial to set up a local streaming box and VPN to get the content costs less than netflix alone. Not to mention hacked fire sticks and similar apps selling multiple catalogs for less than a single streaming service per month.
So: where does the extra money go ? (Score:4, Insightful)
They are taking more money from customers, how will that be used ?
* to pay for increased infrastructure costs
* to pay more to the film studios ?
* increase netflix's profits ?
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Executive bonuses and researching better ways to push more ads into content while increasing subscription fees.
Bye... (Score:2)
Re: Bye... (Score:2)
will have to choose either... (Score:2)
...or do without. As long as you treat this as a choice between differently priced options, prices are going to creep up. Your only power is to unsubscribe.
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For quite some time, Netflix was the one streaming service we just kept all year round. Honestly it was more from inertia than anything else - just like we kept a 1-disc plan going far longer than it made sense, we kept their streaming service for quite a while even after they'd lost most of their good content (their "Originals" are mostly crap).
But, finally, we cancelled last December... and, so far, no one in the house has missed it. If Netflix gets something new that sounds good, we'll probably pick it u
2024 year when streaming services became cable (Score:3)
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>"2024 year when streaming services became cable. We made a full circle, expensive service with ads."
Nope. Not the same. Cable is too expensive, yes, but with TiVo/DVR there are no forced ads with cable or over-the-air. Been that way for decades. Ads on streaming cannot be skipped or fast-forwarded, they are a corporate wet-dream.
The question is, will streaming plans become ad-only? And the second question is- will the ad-free plans become so expensive that it rivals cable? I mean, Netflix now MORE
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>"Before TiVo/DVR you couldn't skip commercials on TV."
Are you that young? ;) Before TiVo, I scheduled recordings on my VCR and watched them when and how I wanted to. I haven't watched "live" television programming since at least the mid 80's.
>"Next item that will show up is DVR for Streaming so you can rewind commercials and we will be exactly at the same spot."
The media companies *hated* VCRs (and fought them in court), then *hated* DVR's (and fought THEM in court), and then started to *hate* phys
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I have never experienced that on TiVo. I opted for the old UI, which is fast and simple. And according to your reference, they are not forced-watch. You can skip them with the press of a single button (any of 6).
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We made a full circle, expensive service with ads.
As it was always going to be.
Welcome back to the good ship BitTorrent landlubber, yarrrr.
A two tier currency (Score:2)
We have reached a peak point (Score:2)
And Netflix amongst others (such as Youtube, Prime etc.) have started to notice it, but the money was too good - for a little.
Eventually you get so tired of the same content over and over again and the constant price hikes that you discover other things, we're seeing it with X, we're seeing it with youtube and it's crazy anti-people slaveminded new implementations against adblockers, against anonymity, basically everything freedom related.
Everything you do is tracked, everything you watch, everything you ho
Their squeezing (Score:2)
Growth till they can't grow anymore (which happened), consistently raise prices, crackdown on password sharing which they previously allowed to squeeze for more subscriptions.
I'm going to give it 1 or 2 more years till we start seeing their revenue start to drop.
Enjoy Life (Score:2)
I had Netflix until 2014 and don't miss it at all.
You're missing out on the best years of your life sitting on the couch.
Reconsider.
Bye (Score:1)
Since the day I cut the digital cord, (Score:2)
I managed to buy multiple seasons of many of my favorite shows on either DVD or BluRay discs, and dumped them into NVMe drives. I still have paid less than I was paying for the many subscription services combined, at a rate of over $50/month, and I can also guarantee nobody will take my content away because of lack of contractual clauses with the parties, not because this content is now available at a different streaming service cannibalizing itself.
If you quit now, the basic functionality stays fre (Score:2)
I quit over a month ago over the latest price increase. After being with them for many years, but not watching much. Usually I was just scrolling through their offers for a few minutes to relax.
To my surprise, the login and browsing (with trailer auto play on my Apple TV) still works. The only thing that doesnâ(TM)t is playing the programmes.
So if you usually just browse Netflix, but almost never have the time or energy to commit to actually watch something, you can do that without paying.
Just that you
dumping services (Score:1)