On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 10:07 AM, Jason Carpio <[email protected]> wrote:
> So who called this? > > http://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-prices-2011-7 > Right - this is the other shoe dropping. In my initial post 2 days ago I had said that the service made financial sense in my house at $10/month, but probably would not at $20/month. To keep what we usually have most of the year (steaming + 1 disc), it will now cost us $16/month, so, like Louie De Palma, in one of the great Taxi episodes, they seem to be looking for that price that is high enough to make us go "Ouch!", but not so high that we won't go "eh, okay". For us they probably missed it a little on the high side. The good news for me is that existing customers can stay with their current plans till September 1 - by then I will be ready to go back to the 1 disc/month plan. I will also have enough experience with the new cable service to see if we would still use either disks or streaming. I suspect we will go with the streaming only plan, which would actually represent a $3/month savings for us. There is a possible unstated, but potentially serious downside here: how many streams will we be able to get simultaneously with the new stream only plan? Currently the number of simultaneous streams Netflix guarantees is set by the number of disks you are paying to have out at one time (e.g. 1 stream for 1 disc plans, 2 streams for 2 disc plans, etc). In practice, you can often get 2 simultaneous streams even on the 1 disc plan (we only had problems with this at night, during what I assume are high volume times for Netflix). One reason I went with the 3 disc plan this summer was to guarantee access to three simultaneous streams (which we not infrequently use, with three kids often in three different locations). It helped that Netflix gave us a credit for one and a half months for a small problem, so this really only cost me about $7.50 more for the whole summer). But if the new stream only option only comes with 1 stream at a time, the value of the service will be very much reduced for my household. The good news for people like Jon is that apparently Netflix has decided to ensure the viability of their mail-in program, which clearly was in danger of being swallowed up by the costs and demand for streaming. I suspect that also represents Netflix hedging against the possibility they may not be able to compete with the bigger boys in bidding on access to online content, and they still want to safeguard their core bread and butter. One other point - it is (or at least has been) very easy to switch plans on Netflix - you can do it online, 24/7, it takes effect immediately, and you are only committed till the end of the monthly billing cycle. This means that, for example, if you are on the steam only plan, but find yourself wanting to view a couple of discs, you can just sign-up for a multi disc plan for one month and get them. While this will now be more expensive, given that you also have access to many other discs during the interval, it will probably still be a more attractive option than the old practice of renting 2 or 3 discs, or the new practice of paying for them on-demand from a cable or satellite service. I believe the charge is pro-rated if you change in the middle of the month. We did this when we wanted to watch Sherlock over New Year's Eve and it worked great (in past years I probably would have purchased those DVDs, which maybe would have been nice, but this way was much cheaper, and I can always access them again easily as long as I have Netflix). -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
