Netflix’s New Subscription Plans Don’t Make Us Happy

We like physical media. We still buy albums as CDs. We'd rather have a book than a Kindle. This means we're either old or purists. (Don't tell us which.)

We bring this up because we subscribe to Netflix and liked the fact that our plan allowed for both DVDs and streaming. But now Netflix is going to make us choose between the two. This makes us sad.

Deadline alerted us to the fact that Netflix is changing up their subscription service. The company explained it on their blog, and the big takeaway is that folks like us who pay $9.99 a month for DVDs and streaming will have one of three options starting in September. We can pay $7.99 a month for only DVDs, $7.99 a month for only streaming, or $15.98 a month for both. The old $9.99 rate is going away for good. Granted, $15.98 is pretty reasonable for unlimited DVDs and streaming, but do we want to pay six bucks extra a month? That we're not sure about.

Back in January, Netflix annoyed customers by removing the "Add to DVD queue" option from people who accessed Netflix through a device like PlayStation. At the time, the assumption was that the company was working very hard to wean users off of DVDs. But the problem then, as it is now, is that Netflix's streamed content isn't nearly as vast as its DVD collection is. Still, even people like us who love physical DVDs know that it's merely a matter of time before discs become obsolete.

Or are they? In Netflix's blog post, Jessie Becker, V.P. of Marketing, writes, "we have realized that there is still a very large continuing demand for DVDs both from our existing members as well as non-members." According to Becker, this price change was done because, since so many people still wanted DVDs, they didn't want to keep losing money on them. "Last November when we launched our $7.99 unlimited streaming plan," Becker writes, "DVDs by mail was treated as a $2 add on to our unlimited streaming plan." But because so many people still prefer DVDs to streaming, our reward is we're going to have to pay more for them if we also want to stream movies. So it's decision time for us and a lot of other Netflix users. We're gonna go with the $7.99 DVD-only plan. Let's see if Netflix ups their streaming options enough to make us regret that choice.

Netflix Introduces New Plans and Announces Price Changes [The Netflix Blog]
Netflix Unveils 60% Price Hike For Streaming-Plus-DVD Service [Deadline]