Netflix is starting to raise prices in some countries as growth spurred by its crackdown on password sharing starts to fade.

The film and TV streaming giant said it had already lifted subscription fees in Japan and parts of Europe as well as the Middle East and Africa over the last month.

Changes in Italy and Spain are now being rolled-out.

In its latest results, Netflix announced that it had added 5.1 million subscribers between July and September - ahead of forecasts but the smallest gain in more than a year.

  • shirro@aussie.zone
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    7 hours ago

    They cancelled one too many shows we liked a long time ago and we swore off Netflix for life. Never going back. If they ever make another good show I will wait awhile to see if they cancel it or ruin it before I go get it from somewhere else. Their burned a lot of their old loyal customers that made them a success and now they have to acquire new customers faster than they lose them which isn’t sustainable.

  • Infynis@midwest.social
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    14 hours ago

    Netflix’s content has gotten so much worse too. I don’t think there are many people left that have a subscription for more than one or two shows. And this seems to be a trend across all the different apps. Makes me glad I set up automatic torrenting for everything I’m interested in, and all it costs me is $5/month for Proton VPN

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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      7 hours ago

      I don’t know about you but content has gotten better for me.

      Ranma 1/2, Squid Games, Super Mario Bros Movie, new season of Arcane. I felt like every 1-2 months, there was always something interesting.

      Also note that I don’t pay for Netflix. I do own stock.

      BUY MORE NETFLIX SUBSCRIPTIONS…

    • Retiring@lemmy.ml
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      12 hours ago

      For added convenience, skip the VPN and get a seedbox. If you consider the cost savings in hardware you spend even less.

  • shoulderoforion@fedia.io
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    20 hours ago

    See, the problem with publicly traded corporations is, they’ve got to constantly not only be making as much money this year as they did the previous year, but they’ve got to increase shareholder value, which means, raising prices, or reducing the product to save costs, we have termed that last bit enshitification. I mean, they don’t HAVE to, but if they choose not to, the board of directors will push for a change in CSUITE personnel, and those fuckers are raking in the big bucks, and really really like their 3rd vacation homes in Aspen, so you pay more, or you get less, and sometimes you pay more AND you get less. And the beat goes on.

    • megopie@beehaw.org
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      7 hours ago

      Plenty of privately owned companies do the same things so I don’t think it can be chalked up to an issue with publicly traded companies.

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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        6 hours ago

        The minor difference is private can choose what they want to do. public has a fuduciary duty to increase value

        • megopie@beehaw.org
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          51 minutes ago

          public companies do not necessarily have a Fiduciary duty to the shareholders, let alone one to increase value. Any that they did have (based on the laws and how they are incorporated in a given jurisdiction) would also be applicable to a private company. Private companies also have shareholders, the shares are just not traded publicly.

          You’re probably thinking of the theory of “Shareholder Primacy” but that is a theory not a legal reality, although some insist it is based on a questionable interpretation of the precedent set by dodge vs ford motor company.

          Public companies can be run in what ever way the board/shareholders see fit.

      • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
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        6 hours ago

        It’s all about who owns it and is sitting on the board.

        Bunch of old money type people? They don’t care too much about a bad year, more important to weather the storms and keep the generational money intact.

        Venture capitalists? Jack Welch this dogshit company and get us some short term gains!

    • NotAnArdvark@lemmy.ca
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      17 hours ago

      I don’t see what would be wrong with a world where businesses just satisfied themselves with providing employees with a reasonable living, contributed to the communities they were in, and provided a good or service that was needed. Sitting under a tree and reading a book sounds better than watching the world burn in your name-brand clothes and 5 bedroom 2.5 bath house.

        • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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          10 hours ago

          In the real world, communism also suffered from the mandated growth problem, as well as a long list of other issues that some people still like to pretend solely exist under capitalism and some serious problems that are exclusive to this system. Yes, it is actually bad, with and without Cold War propaganda making it sound both worse and better than it actually was. It failed everywhere for a reason.

          This doesn’t mean that there aren’t real issues with capitalism as well. So far, the best system we’ve come up with as a species is heavily regulated capitalism with strong social safety nets. Not perfect, but nothing is on this rock.

    • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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      19 hours ago

      I mean, they don’t HAVE to, but if they choose not to, the board of directors will push for a change in CSUITE personnel

      If the board doesn’t maximize profit, the shareholders can sue them, so functionally they do have to.

      • Album@lemmy.ca
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        19 hours ago

        Specifically, the Board and thus the CEO must maximize company VALUE not profit.

        There are other ways to increase company value that do not necessarily result in Q/Q / Y/Y profit increases.

        But in the 1970s you get a guy named Milton Friedman who comes along with the concept of shareholder value in a 1970 essay for The New York Times, entitled “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”.[5] In it, he argued that a company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders.

        So there’s been a lot of argument against it since esp as of late, but the economic hegemony still adheres to Friedman’s economic principles.

        • Tywèle [she|her]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          17 hours ago

          There are other ways to increase company value that do not necessarily result in Q/Q / Y/Y profit increases.

          Can you name some examples? I’m not very familiar with economics.

          • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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            17 hours ago

            A bigger market share (or just market size if it’s something new-fangled) at the expense of current profit, because that can turn into future profits. See most modern tech companies, which make a loss but still have value. For example, Uber just made a profit for the first time, and since they’re everywhere that’s a great position for a shareholder, and people bought in in the past in hopes that this would eventually happen.

            OP is a little off, BTW. US law - and it’s probably the same elsewhere - says that the C-suite has to work in the interests of shareholders, who they represent as fiduciaries. It’s just that there’s only a few things a million APPL shareholders have in common, so in practice that interest is value and dividends. In a privately-owned company other things might factor in, for better or for worse.

            IANAL

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      17 hours ago

      TBF small businesses do this too on average. There’s some that don’t, but then there’s also some that straight up do crime, usually against employees.

      To solve this, you either want a well-regulated market, or no market (however that would work).

  • DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com
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    20 hours ago

    lol - I love that I canned all my paid subs that were fucking me up the arse like this, and then used the savings to setup a half-decent Plex server for my family. Fuck those greedy cunts.

    • karashta@lemm.ee
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      20 hours ago

      I keep telling my friends this. It was incredibly simple to do. And you can start with only a couple smaller 1 or 4 TB drives and still end up starting a decent collection

      • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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        17 hours ago

        Especially if you’re fine with the low image quality of streaming services. Equivalent video files aren’t particularly big.

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      20 hours ago

      These owners forgot that media is 100% discretionary spend AND has superior alternative that can be had close to free and a bit of labour…

      I know owners thinks we are all brain dead and only able to consoom… Is we tho?

    • Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.ee
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      19 hours ago

      Pretty much the only one i’m still happy with is crunchyroll. They don’t fuck around despite being basically the only game in town.

      Netflix I pay for begrudgingly but if they raise the price substantially or add mandatory ads EVER they are gonna be gone. I’m already pissed they are axing Kaos, like so many other good shows before it.

      Already axed prime last year due to them adding ads, I don’t even miss the expedited delivery because all the big box stores deliver for free, some even same day, at equivalent prices.

      Disney recently boned me out of account sharing, so my plex server is getting pimped out. $1000 buy gets you substantial NAS storage for 6-7 years. That’s ~$14/mo if you replace nothing for 6 years. By the time drives start dying the sizes double and you can expand your raid as they die off one by one.

      Anywho, Plex servers (and other FOSS alternatives now) usually have no problems transcoding and serving multiple 1080p and 4k streams concurrently. Plus you can download media for offline play within the respective server’s app on all kinds of devices, and for plex the server owner doesn’t need to license guests. That being said, non-plex options are what i’d go with because they are as good or better without any license cost. I just use plex because I bought a lifetime sub before the alternatives were mature. It’s nice having a library that only grows, never shrinks. No temporary licenses or content runs so I can have a massive backlog and not worry if I don’t get around to it for years. Just a lot of wins, no downsides that I know of.

      • averyminya@beehaw.org
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        10 hours ago

        Crunchyroll has its own bullshit too tbh. It just happens to be that the industry is worse than their bs, so Crunchyrolls shenanigans is really just the anime industry.

  • souperk@reddthat.com
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    19 hours ago

    Friendly reminder that the high seas are always an option. Download stremio, install the torrentio addon, and you are good to go.

    • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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      17 hours ago

      Only use torrents if you know what you’re doing. In the developed world, this usually ends with a very expensive letter in your mailbox.

    • shatterling@lemm.ee
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      18 hours ago

      Absolutely my dude, stremio is fantastic. The only reason I still have Netflix is for my youngish kid and I haven’t found parental options for stremio yet

    • I_am_10_squirrels@beehaw.org
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      18 hours ago

      About once a year, we get a Netflix subscription for about two months. Catch up on everything we want to watch, then cancel it.

      After 6 months, Netflix forgets about you. Does that mean we count as a new subscriber every year? How many people like us are inflating their new subscriber number?

      • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
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        16 hours ago

        Obviously Netfilx wants to tell the stock holders how many “new subscribers” they have every quarter. Nobody stopped to think what those numbers actually mean.

      • li10@feddit.uk
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        19 hours ago

        Yeah, Lemmy loves to talk about how this won’t work and they’ve moved to Plex, but overall it’s been working great for Netflix.

        Eventually the bubble will burst and people will start to drop Netflix, but that’s a way off.

        • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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          19 hours ago

          The price is still elastic because many people have another streaming service they can drop. But as they all raise prices, they’ll all be whittled down to just one. And then possibly none.

          • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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            19 hours ago

            No doubt but if people would be a little more proactive… We coulda already squeezed the corpo trash

  • solsangraal@lemmy.zip
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    20 hours ago

    The company is under pressure to show investors what will power growth in the years ahead, as its already massive reach makes finding new subscribers more difficult.

    LOL i think the only potential “new subscribers” remaining are the people who never had and never will have a netflix sub. at this point one of the many reasons i’ll never sign up is because fuck shareholders in general

    • monobot@lemmy.ml
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      18 hours ago

      Just idea that they expect growth where there is none is strange. This business are at the limit and have no way to grow faster than economic situation of many people around the world gets better.

      Sad part is fir them it is better to destroy service trying to increase growth in meaningless ways, than to just find a way to keep the business that is working.

      Idea of infinite growth is ruining us.

  • Jagothaciv@kbin.earth
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    20 hours ago

    The for profit model was probably created by idiots. Just because something like the market and economy are complex doesn’t mean it was put together by smart people.

    Capitalism is cannibalism. Cannibalism of resources, of your job, of your society.

    Idiots put the system together and idiots are holding it together.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      17 hours ago

      Yeah, but I’ve yet to see a detailed alternate proposal. When people talk about anarchism it gets really handwavy really fast, and the other kind of socialism has history of being vapourware.

  • IcePee@lemmy.beru.co
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    20 hours ago

    I was shocked about the amount of content when I browsed BBC’s Iplayer service. They even have films. If you want to save some well known movies and are in the UK, you could exhaust their selection before even having to put your hand in your pocket to splash out on extra privatised content.