Netflix Raises Prices Again 42
Netflix will raise prices on most U.S. and Canadian subscription tiers after adding a record 19 million subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2024, bringing its global total to 302 million users.
The standard plan without ads will increase to $17.99 from $15.49, while its premium tier rises $2 to $24.99. The ad-supported tier will cost $7.99, up $1. The streaming service's quarterly revenue topped $10 billion for the first time, jumping 16%, while operating income rose 52% to $2.3 billion. The company credited recent successes including the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul boxing match and "Squid Game" season two for the subscriber surge.
The standard plan without ads will increase to $17.99 from $15.49, while its premium tier rises $2 to $24.99. The ad-supported tier will cost $7.99, up $1. The streaming service's quarterly revenue topped $10 billion for the first time, jumping 16%, while operating income rose 52% to $2.3 billion. The company credited recent successes including the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul boxing match and "Squid Game" season two for the subscriber surge.
Testing (Score:5, Interesting)
Netflix is simply testing the limits of what people will be willing to pay for their service.
There IS a ceiling and crossing it will see folks leaving the service behind.
Until then, I would expect to see the rates climb every year.
Much like any other industry.
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Abandoned Netflix years ago. I do not miss it.
Re:Testing (Score:4, Insightful)
They hit my limit about 3 years ago. Now I just sign up for one month of service every year to catch up on shows that I missed.
Because Netflix is also doing fewer episodes per season and stretching the breaks between "seasons" on their most popular shows, it usually means that I can get caught up in just one or two weekends of binge watching. It's certainly not worth the $200 a year they're trying to charge me for this service to have it around all the time.
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I'm sure you're not the only one and so I bet they're factoring that in to their calculations. They could raise it to $100/month and you'd pay annually more than now but less than that $200. That's probably too high, but useful to illustrate the point, but maybe that's what they're working on.
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The phenomenon you're referring to is termed the "trust thermocline." [medium.com] Give it 2-3 years, tops, and Netflix will be dead, along with Meta/Facebook.
Note how Twitter keeps hemorrhaging users too...
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I am not sure - I think they may be adapting to the new model. In the DVD days I think most people had a netflix subscription and they kept it year round year after year.
After the shift to streaming without the wait times and reordering (intentional for retention or simply logistical) of queues there isn't much fricition to keep people from signing up binging the show they wanted to see and leaving. That is becoming more common as more competitors have cropped.
Response one was stop dropping full seasons of
Re: Testing (Score:2)
They're adding sports crap, which is the main reason cable got too expensive. I only have it because it's included with T-Mobile, effectively making the ad free version about $6. But it's barely worth that anymore, as another poster mentioned, their better shows now go multiple years between seasons. Fuck that shit, I'm just going stop paying anything at all and go back to piracy rather than effectively pay for a bunch of overpriced sports crap that I never watch.
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Canceling my account (Score:3)
So they're scaling back their scripted content and adding pro sports and WWE and now they're asking me to pay more on top of that? No thank you.
I don't give a toss about pro sports or wrestling so they are functionally asking me to pay more for less and that's not going to fly, especially since they just raised prices in 2023. If they want to create a separate sports pricing tier that would be great but I'm not down with paying for other people's sports packages.
We all know there's other ways of getting a hold of media content and I guess that's the way I'm being pushed.
WWE is not sports it's scripted content (Score:1, Redundant)
WWE is not sports it's scripted content
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I have a feeling lots of pro sports are decided ahead of time. The owners are all part of the same club after all.
Re: WWE is not sports it's scripted content (Score:2)
Why would that bother you? Isn't the whole reason you watched to begin with was to see Kaepernick kneel?
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That's why I said "pro sports and WWE". I'm sorry if that broke your brain.
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Yes and no. The story lines are mapped out in advance, and the matches are not actual sporting competitions as the winners are predetermined.
But not all fiction is "scripted." There is a lot of improv that happens in a wrestling match. Most of it actually. Wrestler's have internal jargon that describes how this works. The word is "calling." Sometimes both wrestlers will be the caller, but more often than not they decide in advance. The caller is basically the person deciding in the moment what move(s) they
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Shhh!! Trump will hunt you down and eat your Chihuahua!!
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Because if media is never paid for then it wont be made. Netflix also used to produce a lot more content that I watched then it does now.
I'm happy to pay for media that I want if it's priced reasonably relative to what I'm getting but a big part of why I left cable was because of pricing structures that added large amounts to my monthly bill to pay for other people's love of watching sports on TV.
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I would say that the vast majority of 'media that is made' it is the opposite. It's made because people will pay for it. Rather than people wanting to pay for media to be made. Therefore I contend that media would be made (and in fact is made) purely because it can be sold. Just how much say do you as a paying customer get in what and how the media you want to watch/be provided is made or produced. I'm going to say the answer is Zero, so why
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What are you talking about? If media companies aren't making a profit they go out of business which means they stop making content. Likewise, if a media company isnt making money making shows in the genres that I enjoy they stop making things in those genres.
As I already said, Netflix used to make far more original content then it does now that I enjoyed thus I was fine with paying the lower fees of the time. Now with higher fees and less content I find them to not be worth the money. Especially when in pla
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I'd argue it's also the case that I don't have much of a say into what content gets created in the streaming marketplace. In the past, ads or DVD sales would tie to people watching or buying the content. Now with streaming there's no 3rd party Neilson ratings and there's no direct one to one payment for a particular show.
On the other hand, no media or less media being made doesn't seem like a problem to me - there's more out there by an order of magnitude or 3 than I could consume, even just of stuff that f
Same ol', same ol' (Score:3)
Farmer milks cows more. News at eleven.
In a couple of yesrs one month's price will equal that of one year when they first began. Streaming services won't mind people switching often because they'll milk the same or even more money by then.
I'm a dreamer (Score:4, Interesting)
I miss the concepts of 'reasonable profits' and 'price-gouging is bad'.
And if sports are so great for media profits, why do sports always end up bundled to force non-fans to subsidize them?
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I miss the concepts of 'reasonable profits' and 'price-gouging is bad'.
And if sports are so great for media profits, why do sports always end up bundled to force non-fans to subsidize them?
Sports are good! Something something something value added something something. SEE!
I couldn't understand why people stayed with Netflix when they started their rate rises almost quarterly for less content. I don't even bother with the once a year thing anymore. There's not enough there to justify paying them for a month. WWE certainly isn't sweetening the pot.
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Honestly, at this point I think it's laziness. People don't want to think about what content they want to watch, don't want to "change channels" or "buy DVDs" or download or whatever. They want to turn on Netflix and just spur of the moment select whatever looks vaguely interesting, and then they just watch it and it just keeps starting the next episode automatically. It's Cable TV reinvented with more specialized channels dedicated to you.
I think some people just like "insert random show here" more than ot
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There you go with trans people on your mind again.
Re: gee, Netflix (Score:3)
They won the price-war with Disney (Score:4, Insightful)
Disney and others were trying to gain streaming market-share away from Netflix, seeing it as a land-grab battle of the new streaming frontier, so there was a giant price-war for a couple of years where the players subsidized their services to attract the most new users. But they couldn't subsidize forever, even fat cats have limits. Now that Netflix is the clear winner, they can go back to being profitable, and consumers get oligopped.
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Netflix is the winner? They're coasting on a few popular shows that are wrapping up, most of their new content is trash
Sure wish Valve would get into video distribution (Score:5, Insightful)
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The rights holders are far too greedy for that. That's why companies like Disney and Paramount got in to streaming, except they helped saturate the market and then discovered how expensive and hard it is to develop and run a well performing scalable streaming platform and service.
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Or Apple and Spotify.
They both do music better then even Netflix does movies and shows, have been doing so for years now, and actually have a fair (And ad-free... mostly... some podcasts do seem to be starting to sink under the weight of ads.) pricing model that is friendly to the customer, while making it trivially easy to access pretty much any mainstream artist and most of the more obscure ones. They are both good at recommending new music based on what they already know you like. And while I'm not sur
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Music is different than TV shows in that there's usually not a new album yearly by each band, or a new song weekly or equivalent. In general open source people have made self hosted netflix equivalents now that work just as well, and then there's the paid Plex.
I've actually just kind of moved to youtube for music - I don't really care about quality much (and I don't think Spotify went for quality either) as I'm using cheap headphones over bluetooth, and youtube has playlists and all the songs for free anywa
Lower quality content (Score:2)
Too much (Score:1)
I finally cancelled my membership. It had been 13 years plus the DVD days starting in 98ish.
Android boxes can help (Score:2)
Ye market be grey. Yarrrr, anchors aweigh!