Netflix Gets A Price Hike in May 2016 – Are You Affected?

Tim Colman What's on Netflix Avatar

Netflix Price Hike

Picture Credit : Mashable.com

There is concern that the Netflix price increase, which is due to take effect in May, has not be widely communicated.  The people who will be most affected are those who have been enjoying “grandfathered” prices for the last two years.

What does “grandfathered” mean? Basically, if you were already a Netflix subscriber, your subscription was frozen for two years last time Netflix increased their prices. While they made it very clear that this was a two year deal at the time, they haven’t been very forthcoming with the news that the deal is expiring. Let’s face it, two years of anything without a price rise is rare in the modern world.

And what does this mean for you? Of course you’ll need to check your own plan but existing Standard subscription plans ($7.99 or $8.99 depending on when you joined) are going to rise to $9.99 a month.

The sensationalist scaremongers have been in a hurry to point out that from $7.99 to $9.99 is a massive 25% increase.  What a load of old tosh. The increase might provoke a few casual users to review their usage and cancel; but the indications are that most people view a $9.99 monthly charge to be fantastic value. We certainly do. It’s about one third the cost per hour of a typical pay TV package.

Where else can you get unlimited original programming, HD buffered streaming across all platforms, full TV series sets, a vast range of movies on demand, new content almost daily and much more for the price of a New York breakfast? And you can downgrade to the Basic package, upgrade to the Premium pack or simply cancel at any time.  That seems to be a pretty fair deal.

In the end there will be a few days of stink, largely from the media, and then people will get on with watching this extraordinary product at an entirely reasonable price.  We will and we’re sure most of you will too.

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Tim helped co-found What's on Netflix with Kasey back in 2013 after a career in publishing covering both the skiing and the scuba diving sectors. Tim loves the older movies and cult classics which shines through in his features and top movies list. Tim also maintains the central database for What's on Netflix driving the A-Z library. Tim resides in Norwich, UK.