Netflix raises prices for every subscription tier by up to 12.5 percent

My wife and I canceled Netflix a while ago and went back to DVDs. An FYE store in our area recently had a store closing sale, so we bought three DVD players and snapped up all our favorite DVDs for a few bucks each.

No subscription, no mid-movie ads, and no worrying about this or that service losing the streaming rights to whatever.

Good for them, I cancelled my subscription simply because Linux support is so awful. It's impossible to watch in 4k, and even with 1080p you frequently get automatically downgraded to lower res bitrate whenever the window isn't focused. Absolutely daunting.

This is a no brainer for Netflix and any other streaming service. I have NO IDEA what I pay for all my streaming, whether it comes thru a credit card/cell phone benefit or not, nor even who pays for it (e.g. me, or my partner, or someone in my extended family).

They are profiting off of my ignorance.

My wife is a big movie/drama series watcher. She will occasionally flips through Netflix catalog, but will always check first if the series has finished or not. If it isn't, she'll not bother. There are so many series that Netflix started but didn't finish. That and a lot of fodder movies Netflix produced.

So in the end, my wife usually doesn't end up watching anything on Netflix. We only have that account because it was sponsored by T-mobile. Otherwise, we'd not be subscribing to Netflix.

Cue up people shouting about how this is horrible and that they're totally going to cancel, only to be followed by Netflix making even more money next quarter.

There's barely anything worth watching on Netflix anymore but somehow their stock is rising and they manage to increase subscription prices. I had been subscribing on and off for the past few years but recently almost never because anything worth watching (for me anyway, although I don't have some weird intricate taste in media content) is elsewhere.

I already canceled last year. It's too bad, because there is a lot of Netflix content that I like. It just seems that it takes much more time clicking around to find it, and I don't have time for that. I used Netflix on Roku, and the UX is abysmal.

Question for anyone who works in this space: is the reason why most (all?) streaming services I see have the same exact UI problems because they are copying each other, or is it because of some constraint in the Roku API which doesn't allow them to fix them? For example, on Netflix, Amazon and Youtube, if I click down to a new row, (say, from Recommended for You to Action Movies), many of the icons shown will be for content that was already offered in the rows above. Like, I've already said no to this movie five times in the last minute, why do you keep asking? It's pure waste. I figure at least one of the streaming services would do things differently (and thus gain market share), but I haven't seen one. Is it due to platform limitations?

I would love for a service to automate cycling through services. Some small fee to automate getting a month or two of service from a selection of providers and just rotate. I don't need year round Netflix, Hulu and Disney but I think I'd be in trouble if I cancelled all of them. Anyone wanna startup?

What would be great is if the EU makes some kind of regulation (it worked for usb-c?) about some kind of interoperable streaming platform pricing that forces a kind of standardization across platforms and allows at least a little bit of customization.

Let me opt into or out of ads, and let me "switch channels" across multiple different streaming services on a standardized interface with predictable pricing. Is that so crazy?

The issue is the Netflix doesn't really have that much more of a compelling catalog than anyone else, their tech is not a differentiator anymore, I might like the stuff on there right now more than Disney+ but that might change later.

The fact that what's keeping anyone on Netflix is only a slightly bothersome switching cost is probably bad news for them long-term.

you can get a seedbox with 1T of storage for about 6€/month. That gives you access to basically all popular movies and tv series in 4k, most media in 1080p and spotty access to older/niche releases you'd not be able to watch on mainstream streaming platforms.

I remember signing up to Netflix to watch house of cards back in the early 2010s and being absolutely blown away.

I don’t think there’s been a single show on Netflix I’ve genuinely looked forward to in the past couple of years. It’s like they completely gave up on quality content and just shovel out the most mediocre slop. I’m amazed people still pay these ever increasing prices.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536393

are existing subscribers grandfathered in or no?

I won't be cancelling by subscription because I don't have one :) I have found I get way more value out of subscribing for 1-2 months to a service and then switching to another or going a few months without any.

At this point, netflix will keep raising prices. Because they can, and because they have to as a public company beholden to shareholders. I'm not sure there are other markets or other products/services they could expand into, i think they've already reached a point of saturation.

The debt subsidies are over, time to pay the piper.

Honestly, having parted for the seven seas years ago, every time I check I'm surprised how much the frog's been boiled.

General quality seems on par with soap opera slop, shows look like they've become a genre itself with different structure and even lightning, there's more trash tv there than there used to be in cable (which saying something), etc.

I cancelled Netflix long ago, they started cancelling their best shows (like 1899, etc) and producing absolute garbage. I mean just look at the quality of early/peak Netflix to now. Stranger Things is a great example, the decline is visible not just in the story but in the visuals. The documentaries are also bad now, I watched the "Manosphere" at someone's house, and while you can agree with the premise that these people are deranged, it was clearly a cash grab and didn't really move the needle. Then the catalogue has been gutted, and it's just mostly garbage now. Just awful stuff.

The last truly remarkable series they had was Dark. Everything since has slid into being for low attention span people on their phones, and for that reason I no longer give it my attention, or money. I guess it's working out for them, since they keep printing money...but I think it won't last forever. Look at Disney, the decline can come quick once the cracks turn into fault lines.

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