Technology

Netflix announced that it's password crackdown "exceeded expectations"

I am so disappointed in you, US consumer.

Netflix announced that starting today, users on its $9.99 per month Basic plan will now have to pay $11.99, and those paying $19.99 per month for Premium will have to pay $22.99

That's insane. The only way those price hikes could possibly be justified is if the majority of movie/show creators had their catalogues available on Netflix. But they don't because everyone and their mother wants their own fucking streaming service, ruining streaming for everyone.

No thanks. I got a library card and access to my entire county's book/audio-book/movie/show catalogue for free through Libby and Hoopla. As for everything else I can't find there... Yarr.

“As we deliver more value to our members, we occasionally ask them to pay a bit more,”

But you're not doing the first half, so you can't do the second half..

Bye bye Netflix. Onward to the high seas.

Piracy is always a service issue. It never went away, and it will never go away. Why should I spend the little money I have on a service that repeatedly jacks up prices, while also killing your favorite shows, or losing licences to stream other content?

Management every time they increase the price.

Netflix, what are you trying to do? I can't cancel my subscription in protest if it's still cancelled from the last time you did something boneheaded.

I've probably been subscribing to Netflix for a decade now, but this is the largest price increase they have ever done on the basic plan, and this is the first time I have seriously started to consider cancelling.

I need to go through my list and figure out what I really want to watch, and then just binge it. (I have never binge watched anything, but this is giving me an actual incentive to)

Is this a monthly thing now?

Another reason I won’t be returning as a customer.

Yarr intensifies

About to set up a Realdebrid account and get kodi running on my pc, brb

watchseries id

fmoviesz to

... and get on with life

Cue all the "that's it, I'm out" comments. Seems like no one actually ever leaves.

Oh hey. Another reason to no go back to pick up a Netflix account.

RealDebrid with Stremio or Kodi.

Anyone who complains about this: If you didn't cancel your acccount back when they cracked down on account sharing it's your own fault.

They saw that they made more profit this way and now they gonna keep squeezing as much as possible.

It's not too late tho but i doubt enough will jump the ship to make a change

For anyone looking to bail - get a nice VPN and sail the high seas instead! I use protonvpn for $120 per 2 years ($5 per month) they also have free servers you can try out but they're super slow. Another good one is mullvad for €5 per month (doesn't get cheaper with longer plans, but €5 a month isn't bad). Be wary of vpn reviews though because I know a lot are sponsored.

Protonvpn and mullvad are based in Switzerland and Sweden, respectively, and both countries have great privacy laws. Been using protonvpn for a while and haven't had any issues personally.

For getting into torrenting, I definitely recommend the arr suite (radarr for movies, sonarr for tv, some others for other uses) and qbittorrent for actual torrenting. Also very good idea to stick everything in docker containers, you can route them through a gluetun container that uses your VPN so even if you shut your VPN down systemwide those are still protected. The arr suite helps with managing what you get, getting better qualities, automatically getting new releases, etc.

Plex is great for viewing your content and such, can either do one time purchase or a subscription, $120 for lifetime which is the same as paying for 3 years of subscription I think? You can also use Kodi which is free and open source but imo more annoying to setup and has a worse layout.

There's plenty of guides online for setting things up, but make sure to never torrent without a vpn unless it's non-copyrighted

It's almost like streaming models aren't sustainable for anybody involved. ;)

Oh, you're still paying for Netflix? Well... sucks to be you!

Thanks for the heads up. I just cancelled my subscription. I had premium but $23 per month is ridiculous.

I am nearly giddy at the thought of finally cancelling my subscription. It's been like 13-14 years for me I think.

Lol glad I canceled yesterday and sent an account deletion request.

I think the issue is that Netflix always had a lot of debt and thought they could grow a lot more. They had a really solid income, then suddenly their catalog was shrinking thanks to the million other streaming services while they simultaneously started declining in subscriptions right when the cost of debt skyrocketed (even if some of their debt is still at lower rates).

Not that I'm cheering on the price increase by any means, nor am I currently a subscriber. Still though in some way I can see why they're doing it and have a feeling we're just at the tip of the iceberg in how bad tech corporate services are going to get for a bit.

On an unrelated note, VPNs and/or I2P are cool things to check out.

Edit: One thing too to bring up is that password sharing may still be a breeze. If you set up a VPN - not a commercial one but you setup yourseld on either on a VPS or on your home network - as long as anybody is on it they'll look like they're from the same household.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Netflix last raised its prices in March 2022, bringing the Premium plan to $19.99 and the Standard tier to $15.49.

The streamer stopped offering its $9.99 Basic ad-free plan to new and relapsed users in July, forcing them to fork out more to avoid ads.

“As we deliver more value to our members, we occasionally ask them to pay a bit more,” Netflix writes in its letter to shareholders.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported the streamer would raise the cost of its subscription a “few months” after the Hollywood actors strike ends, and now it’s happened even though the actors are still striking.

Last month, the Writers Guild of America ended their strike after reaching a deal with services like Netflix to provide streaming data, higher minimum pay, and better residuals.

Meanwhile, the service is also debuting its Squid Game reality show and Scott Pilgrim anime in November, while also adding Across the Spider-Verse later this month.

The original article contains 294 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 46%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Their content turned fairly bad. Witcher and Stranger Things were the only reasons to keep it. So why keep it?

Haven’t had it for a while. It was cool in the 00s, started to go bad in the 10s. Inertia can only take you so far.

Hell, even AppleTV free run had more decent content for 3 mos.