The streaming service is raising the price of its Premium and Basic subscriptions in several countries, as well as cracking down on password sharing.

The price hike was announced in Netflix’s quarterly report, and while it’s only planned to increase the Premium and Basic subscription levels in the US, UK and France at the moment, we’d say the same as we did with Twitter’s $1 per year fee: it’s only a matter of time before it’s implemented everywhere, so we’ll give you a heads up on exactly what’s going on…

The Basic subscription in the US will be $12 instead of $10 (20% increase), and the Premium subscription will be $23 instead of $20 (15% increase). The price of the Advertising and Standard subscriptions will remain the same ($7 and $15.5 per month respectively). The amount is not important for us here, but the rate of increase is worth noting because if the price increases are coming here, we can probably expect a similar rate.

Last year, Netflix added 2.4 million subscribers to its user base and generated $7.9 billion in revenue, but this year the number of subscribers has grown by 8.8 million and revenue is now at $8.54 billion. It remains to be seen how subscribers will react to the price increase. They may switch to competing platforms (e.g. HBO Max or Disney+) while Netflix adds more movies, shows and documentaries to its catalog.

The Premium tier of Netflix is the only one where you can watch programs with spatial audio in 4K resolution. The other tiers only offer 1080p resolution. By the way, the number of passwords shared has not decreased as much as Netflix expected, so it takes some effort to do it on another level (good luck, it usually never gets the reaction it should, the same with YouTube’s popups to block adblockers and block video playback…). The goal? They want to make more money.

So the price hike is coming soon, which unfortunately was expected since Netflix already hinted at it before…

Source: WCCFTech