Netflix kills Basic plan, making its cheapest ad-free tier $15.49
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
There you have it folks. Your eyeballs are worth more than $8.50/mo -- no wonder they're so hungry to get people to get used to ads. If they can get you to crack the door, they can slowly raise prices and also get that sweet sweet ad revenue.
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Downgraded just in time. The moment they cancel the 9,99$ option is the same moment I’m canceling.
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Yup. The ad business is huge money. Not the least because ad buyers pay ridiculous amounts of money for ads time.
With subscribers the amount of money you can make is cost of subscription x # of subscribers and you have a limited number of prices you can charge subscribers. With ad revenue the amount of money you can make is limited only by the number of companies who value your access to eyeballs.
I expect to see them to introduce an ad-supported cheaper version of the Standard Plan the next time they need to show revenue growth and try to move Standard Plan customers onto it.
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Moves like this certainly aren't going to drive people to view Netflix content from less-than official sources. Or, in the very least, cancel their subscriptions. Paying a monthly fee to access content and still seeing ads is an insane concept to me. You'd think that with all the stiff competition they have they'd, I dunno, make their service more enticing to potential and current users.
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I have no problems with ads on Hulu, so it depends on how Netflix implements them, but the "limited library" thing turns me off.
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This will help them pay their striking writers what they deserve and bring an end to the writer's strike, right?
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I axed my Netflix account like 5 price bumps ago. With all the competition, Netflix doesn't get the good network and cable shows by default anymore, and their original stuff isn't worth $5 a month.
I keep the Disney going for my nieces and nephews, HBO is free with my cell plan, and I'll occasionally get a month of Hulu or Paramount Plus. That's far more than enough.
I keep the Disney going for my nieces and nephews, HBO is free with my cell plan, and I'll occasionally get a month of Hulu or Paramount Plus. That's far more than enough.
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Dark Pumpkin
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I found a browser extension that can fast forward ads on Amazon Prime video. Ad blocking doesn't work on those ads but having the ad auto-mute and fast forward in a couple of seconds makes them not so bad.
My assumption is that something similar will, or already does exist for Netflix.
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Thing is, Netflix is living on borrowed time. They've been trying to pump out original content for a while, but ultimately they don't have the gravitas of Disney/Paramount/HBO/etc to keep people engaged and the sweetheart deals on licensing are long behind them. The decisions they've been making are those of people who know that the gravy train is slowing down and that in a decade or so Netflix will probably be acquired by Amazon or Disney. The experience of the user is tertiary to pleasing the "anything but infinite growth = failure" shareholders and maintaining high corporate pay packets.
I like Netflix enough to keep watching, but I have no illusions about the long-term viability.
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Yeah, the price was about right so obviously it couldn't last. My kids don't care about 1080 vs 720 and neither do I on my phone on public transit. They won't be getting more money from me, they'll just get it over fewer months before I cycle to the next service.
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uesc_marathon
Ars Scholae Palatinae
If you had Netflix stock I hope you already sold it, this company is dying.
I'm disappointed in how fast streaming services copied the exact same path as cable television. Was it really only a bit less than a decade that we had it good?
Blew my mind when I learned that before I was alive, one of the selling points of cable television was no commercials.
I'm disappointed in how fast streaming services copied the exact same path as cable television. Was it really only a bit less than a decade that we had it good?
Blew my mind when I learned that before I was alive, one of the selling points of cable television was no commercials.
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We all saw it coming. I bet there will be ads on all tiers before long, with the option to pay more to get rid of them if you're lucky.
We dropped Netflix when they started telling us we'd have to pay more to use the streams we already paid for. It was by far our least watched streaming service anyway. We've been streaming a lot Max instead.
We dropped Netflix when they started telling us we'd have to pay more to use the streams we already paid for. It was by far our least watched streaming service anyway. We've been streaming a lot Max instead.
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I haven't had Netflix in 10 years until about a month ago. I thought that kind of time would free me up for a new user sort of deal, a little trial into which I could cram Black Mirror, but nope.
I don't care enough to create another email address to end run my existing account, so I paid it, but I remember feeling slightly weirded out. Like an ex that bought the last dinner before you broke up ten years ago and hasn't forgotten that they're out $18 for your meal.
Watching Black Mirror etc I'm not sure how I could watch without the 4K + HDR. There's crazy bad compression and banding. Even watching on an OLED in a dark room at night, there are parts of Better Call Saul that are just invisible. It might actually be unwatchable at that bottom tier, at least not without blowing out all your other settings.
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Given current Netflix decision making, It seems more likely they’ll make the current standard plan ad-supported w/ an optional add on to remove ads.
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That's it for me then, goodbye Netflix.
I bumped my Netflix account down to the basic service after they stopped me sharing my account with my step-dad who lives in a different city in my state.
The BigN can suck the BigD. Cya, and I won't miss ya.
I bumped my Netflix account down to the basic service after they stopped me sharing my account with my step-dad who lives in a different city in my state.
The BigN can suck the BigD. Cya, and I won't miss ya.
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I am almost always willing to pay a bit more for no ads, did it for YT red, hulu, and I will continue to avoid them on whatever platform I use. I find amazon prime video pretty annoying as there are some ad stuff baked in there to benefit amazon.
When you don't pay for the service you are the product.
When you don't pay for the service you are the product.
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The golden age of streaming was entirely predicated on studios not realizing how much they could get for licensing rights, not to mention that despite the growing amount of films/shows Netflix had in their stream library there were always certain films/shows that never made it from DVD to stream but showed up in searches.
And while people are celebrating Netflix's death, it's not like the other services aren't also right behind them on the enshitification assembly line.
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A healthy combination of uBlock Origin on Firefox* + PiHole on your side of the demark can do the trick.
Otherwise, not really.
*uBlock (Lite) on chrome is not recomended due to the impending Manifest V3 Extension Appocalipse
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It's funny, all these services keep raising prices while making the user experience worse. I don't have the time or energy to track down what show has moved to what service or if it was canceled and removed completely. There's so much garbage content to sort through the few times i do pick up the remote I often give up out of frustration. A subscription plan with commercials isn't even an option for me personally, it's either the higher plan or no subscription at all, currently it's no subscription.
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I get the sinking feeling that they GREW the total subscriber base in total and in most plans.
But we will know for sure at 3PM PST during their conference .... "Stay tuuuuuuned!!!!!!!"
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They also don’t pay out residuals like cable TV, yet they want to raise prices? I don’t think I’ll be holding on to Netflix much longer.
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See, I think it's exactly the opposite. Execs at Disney, Warner, and Paramount screwed up their own streaming service rollout hard. They all are losing money and their shareholders aren't in it for the long haul, so they are already pulling content off their services and looking to try to sell the rights to stream it to other players to try to recoup the massive black holes of debt they dug for themselves. Meanwhile Netflix is turning a a profit. For all of the studios streaming is a cost sink that loses them money and tangential to their core business. For Netflix streaming is their core business and development of new shows is tangential.
Netflix just needs to weather the storm of the studios all thinking they can out-Netflix Netflix. That's why they had to move into creating original content in the first place - because they could see all of the studios moving into their territory and cutting them off from the shows they needed to keep their service running. With the idiot CEOs of the studios finally waking up to realize that there is no way that they can actually make their streaming services profitable in the short term, they're waking up to needing to have someone to pay them for their shows. And Netflix is right there, ready to hand over cash in exchange for streaming rights.
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The problem is we could never have had the decades before the enshittification caught up.
There have been a few post mortems on WoW Classic, and it never replicated classic wow. Why? The real power curve in wow was the slow development of tools and raid management techniques which trivialized early content and lead the the steady rise in more complex fights and inflated power of post-classic raids.The players brought all that Shadowlands optimization back with them. Classic power levels were no match for modern raid groups. They brought the reasons modern raiding is panned back with them, and in doing so lost the reasons they wanted a classic raiding experience.
Streaming was birthed into a developed eco-system. It needs to be handled differently than broadcast to work, but those in charge bring the broadcast system with them.
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Whew
I thought I was on the Basic plan, since that was what I had before I suspended my account over a year ago. I resumed the account 5 months ago, and apparently it got "resumed" at the Standard rate of $15.49/month.
After seeing this article, I checked to make sure, and I was able to change it back to Basic, and be grandfathered in.
I don't think it's worth $15.49/month, at least not consistently. If that becomes my only option (other than ads--which are out of the question) I'll subscribe one month at a time when a show I'm interested in is fully available, and then cancel.
I thought I was on the Basic plan, since that was what I had before I suspended my account over a year ago. I resumed the account 5 months ago, and apparently it got "resumed" at the Standard rate of $15.49/month.
After seeing this article, I checked to make sure, and I was able to change it back to Basic, and be grandfathered in.
I don't think it's worth $15.49/month, at least not consistently. If that becomes my only option (other than ads--which are out of the question) I'll subscribe one month at a time when a show I'm interested in is fully available, and then cancel.
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"If you had Netflix stock I hope you already sold it, this company is dying."
...he says with NFLX at it's highest price since January 2022.
From 1 month ago to now, it is up 9.9%, an annualized rate of > +200%
From 2 months ago to now, it is up 30.9%, an annualized rate of > +400%
In the last six months, up 51.3% (+129% annualized)
In the last 12 months, +73.2%
[edit] I'm not suggesting keeping stock you already have (or selling it, that is between you and your financial advisors), more that if you had been watching the recent changes that Netflix has been implementing (ads and making it harder to use the service when not in your physical home slash sharing) and sold your stock "pro-actively", well you ended up leaving a decent amount of money on the table.
...he says with NFLX at it's highest price since January 2022.
From 1 month ago to now, it is up 9.9%, an annualized rate of > +200%
From 2 months ago to now, it is up 30.9%, an annualized rate of > +400%
In the last six months, up 51.3% (+129% annualized)
In the last 12 months, +73.2%
[edit] I'm not suggesting keeping stock you already have (or selling it, that is between you and your financial advisors), more that if you had been watching the recent changes that Netflix has been implementing (ads and making it harder to use the service when not in your physical home slash sharing) and sold your stock "pro-actively", well you ended up leaving a decent amount of money on the table.
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The limited content part is more a requirement of the studios than something netflix wants. as contracts for content lapse and get renegotiated, the content unavailable to the ads tier will appear there, or become unavailable for all tiers.
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Care to share the name of said extension? even a link? Thanks in advance
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Netflix is now the darling of wall street and every speculator! They are praising it like it was a bubble worth stretching till it burst!
According to some wallstreet analyst, the platform is so strong now, thanks to its crackdown on password sharing, it cannot sink…. At least, not like the titanic
For Wall Street it is not about quality, it is about how much you can get out of the masses.
I cancelled it in February and I take every wallstreet analysis with a rock of salt.
According to some wallstreet analyst, the platform is so strong now, thanks to its crackdown on password sharing, it cannot sink…. At least, not like the titanic
For Wall Street it is not about quality, it is about how much you can get out of the masses.
I cancelled it in February and I take every wallstreet analysis with a rock of salt.
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AmanoJyaku
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Agreed.
I find movie ads on Peacock to be fine, as they play at the beginning of the film while I'm in the kitchen getting snacks. It's only TV series where ads become annoying, since they pop up several times over the course of an episode.
I would only consider an ad-free tier for a service I watch heavily. Peacock didn't make the cut, as I only paid to get past the premium content limit of the free plan so I could watch two series. (We Are Lady Parts S2, when???)
I haven't been on Neflix for around 10 years, so I'd probably start with ad-supported just to check out the library. The content might convince me to move to a higher tier. Maybe. I just don't watch that much TV.
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You are quite wrong. When cable started in the '50s, it was only to retransmit OtA channels, which means cable was born with Ads on ALL channels. The introdution of premium channels with no ads is a latter Phenomenon.
If you want more info, you can check "Broadcasting in America" Head, et al An exacelent book indeed.
At least with (most) streamers, you have the choice between ads and no-ads (with different prices)
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It's not even that - it's about their perception about how much the company is going to pay off, whether their perception is actually grounded in fact or not is another story.
And that's why the ad model is so attractive to Netflix and other streamers. With subscriptions any wall street analyst can take the subscriber numbers, multiply them by the cost of a subscription, and see exactly how much revenue the company is expected to bring in.
But with ad revenue only the company itself knows how much the companies buying ads are paying and how much they're paying per impression (or whatever metric they use). And that means it's harder for wall street types to easily predict the target numbers before the company wants to announce them. Puts more power into the hands of the company when it comes to controlling the narrative around their stock price.
(Also you can make a lot more money on ads than you can on subscriptions if you have a large enough base of eyeballs to show them to. Companies that buy advertising generally just throw money at media companies that have a large number of viewers/subscribers/etc.)
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