If you’re on a tight monthly spending budget for your digital subscriptions, you might want to revisit those numbers again. Netflix has announced that they will once again be raising prices for their various plans, this time around with a 13-18% increase. As expected, people are not pleased with this news although the company still expects their subscriber numbers to not fall drastically as they’re still one of the cheaper and better services around, even with the imminent price increase.
With the number of original programming that they have been releasing, both in terms of series and movies, it’s not surprising at all that they would sort of pass on these costs to their subscribers. They had to ratchet up the number of shows and movies that they were producing in order to compete with the other streaming services that keep on entering the market.
The cost though is now US subscribers will have to pay $8.99 for the basic plan from the previous $7.99 per month. The standard plan, which allows you to stream on two devices will now cost $12.99 per month from $10.99. The most expensive plan will now get you to shell out $15.99 per month as compared to its current price of $13.99. If you compare it to some of its closest competitors like Hulu ($11.99) and HBO Now ($14.99), the increased prices are still relatively cheaper.
Netflix planned to spend $8 billion in 2018 in order to increase subscriber growth. While they did achieve that goal, they also got themselves into double the amount of debt ($6.5 billion in 2017 from just $3.36 billion in 2016). For 2018, the number is excepted to be at $8.33 billion. At the end of September 2018, they reported that they already had 137 million customers. They are expected to release the 4Q numbers later this week.
Subscribers have been complaining on Twitter and message boards, with some saying they’re happy with non-original content so they don’t need a deluge of new shows and movies that have been produced by Netflix. Meanwhile, T-Mobile assured its subscribers that Netflix is still on them until further notice as they try to determine the impact this price increase will eventually have.
Today Netflix let us know they’re increasing prices. Good news: #NetflixOnUs won’t change for now. It’s still on us! We’re working with Netflix to determine what impact, if any, this may have down the road. We will know more by 5/1!
— John Legere (@JohnLegere) January 15, 2019
VIA: Reuters
