Quote:
Originally Posted by David Marseilles
I suspect netflix has been giving people a incredible value for their money up to this point, while growing the content selection. You have a kind of chicken and egg problem. You need a broad subscriber base to be able to afford content and for negotiating purposes on the price of the content, but you can't charge full price when your selection is weak sauce. So they gave us a bargain for years, and now it's time to pay for what we're getting. They certainly didn't sell that idea very smoothly, as jersey noted. Not that it would have helped much.
The downside to the "unlimited" streaming model is you pay the same whether you are consuming 10 hours a day or just a little content every weekend, so the light users are subsidizing the heavy ones. When it was basically free on top of the disc plan, folks weren't as likely to complain about that imbalance. With the price increase, the burden-to-use ratio feels less just.
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I'm in Canada and using Netflix here, which was only introduced a little over a year ago.
The selection is much, much, much smaller than Netflix USA and has never offered DVDs, but the selection of streaming video has grown steadily and hasn't slowed.
I'm concerned that we're paying so little for the service ($8 a month) because they're trying to build their Canadian presence, and it's only a matter of time before they're big enough to jack up the price significantly. Seeing this happen south of the border leads me to believe a price increase is an inevitable eventuality.
At this point in time, I don't think their selection is enough to justify a bigger price. We'd probably be willing to pay up to twice as much...
if the selection was more than twice what it is now. We just couldn't justify giving them that much more given the fairly low percentage of what we like out of their selection to what they have.