Netflix’s Prices Are Rising Faster Than Cable

I said this again recently, but it's worth repeating: Netflix is on the very fast downward slope. Their catalog is wilting, the space is heating up with well-established competitors moving in and serving the precise content that Netflix originally built their brand on, and their efforts to fund a new catalog with new IP (and taking ownership of old IP) is destroying the business model that made them so appealing in the first place. The writing is very nearly on the wall. At one point, long ago, the Netflix CEO (?) said they were trying to become HBO before HBO became them. And, frankly, they failed. They are still the industry leader, but only for a moment.

&gt; But Netflix’s quarterly subscriber growth is now slowing in spite of spending more money than ever on content<p>To me the problem is the content. They now seem to produce shows for particular niches that are never my niche. Some of these extremely expensive shows are laughably low quality on all fronts: story, acting, stylistic choices, cinematography&#x2F;direction... everything.<p>Take the new Cowboy Bebop: it&#x27;s obviously not made for fans of the original. Is it made for new fans? For adults? For children? I couldn&#x27;t tell.<p>Half the tentpole movies of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s were my niche, so it&#x27;s not as though I&#x27;m a difficult audience.<p>If Netflix produce shows with particular political or cultural slants, they need to make sure there&#x27;s an audience of people who watches shows for their politics &amp; cultural slants, rather than for being, er, good.<p>I watch shows with compelling stories and solid characters. I&#x27;m not interested in race, gender, sexual orientation, identity, etc, except inasmuch as it makes for interesting stories and adds to a character&#x27;s personality or motivations.<p>There&#x27;s an audience of people on Twitter who defend&#x2F;malign Netflix shows, and people on Youtube who make&#x2F;consume video essays about them, but is anybody in that group actively watching that original content with joy and getting more value from their Netflix subscription than they got the previous year?<p>I wish I were, but I&#x27;m not.

The golden age of Netflix was when it had a full library of other networks&#x27; shows.<p>It was completely unsustainable at $8.99&#x2F;mo or whatever it was back in 2013-15. The price of the brick went up each time renewal discussions happened, and the rights holders were planning to set up their own networks anyway.<p>What I didn&#x27;t anticipate was how fast Netflix would dump AAA content and replace it with a deluge of B and C grade TV shows. The halo effect that &quot;Netflix Original&quot; used to have thanks to shows like House of Cards is long gone. Browse through the listings past the Top 10 shows and it looks like a 3rd rate cable tv channel showing nothing but straight to DVD movies.

Netflix is part of the FAANG acronym because they have all these highly paid engineers. Presumably those people have been doing <i>something</i> for the past 5 years in anticipation of being disrupted by Disney&#x2F;HBO&#x2F;etc. besides maintaining their CDN and tweaking recommendation engines, but it&#x27;s not clear what - the product is more or less the same as it always was.

Honestly, at $167 a year the content on Netflix is very…blah. Yet it’s also very diverse with more niches and sub-genres to explore. Also it’s foreign content is amazing and has introduced me to things like wuxia, xianxia, the Scandinavian Police Procedural, and Whatever The Heck French Cinema Is Doing These Days.<p>Unfortunately, with the content being so vast and “throw it at the wall” I’ve found it’s recommendation engine is becoming far, far worse.<p>The Lost Daughter is exactly the sort of Indie Film Navel Gazing Trash (TM) that I want to watch on my iPad in bed. I only found out about the movie from a Reddit post. It did not once hit the hero banner on any of my devices, much less surface in a recommendation category further down. I’ve thumbs up’ed several movies of similar style, content, and even actors (Olivia Colman ALONE should surface it in my recommendations considering how many things she’s in were thumbs-upped.)<p>There’s also the weird place that the whole “My List” feature sits. Sometimes their A&#x2F;B testing (or something) completely removes it from my home screen. All I get is “Keep Watching” and then recommendations. However, adding a show to your list seems to suck you immediately into a black hole of <i>just that thing</i>. It completely overrides the recommendation engine until you go out of your way to watch something else.<p>I dunno, I just keep finding my interactions with Netflix baffling and with the price continuing to rise harder and harder to justify outside of picking up for a month at time when my “Things to watch on Netflix” list hits a show and two movies worth.

It&#x27;s all starting to get expensive. The content on Netflix keeps disappearing without warnings. Half the time you have subtitles in a limited number of languages. Also they now started adding games, why do I need to pay extra for games I never subscribed for or even want? Make it a add-on or something.<p>For example, Netflix DE has subtitles but the Netflix UK won&#x27;t have the same German subtitles available. Disney+ is doing this better by offering the nearly all subtitles nearly all the time. I can understand that dubbed audio might not be available on other country Netflix&#x27; but the subtitles?<p>Sometimes I am too tired to listen to English and prefer to read subtitles :)

I stopped using Netflix when their catalog went from a rotation of decent movies and TV series to a pile of house produced content that shoves irrelevant content at me.<p>Something about Netflix produced shows seem too crafted by marketing types. It&#x27;s like a committee comes up with a list of attributes for a show that are just the right amount of woke, edgy, trendy, and demographic evenness. The result is a simulacrum of a TV show, like it is in an uncanny valley. It looks and smells like good content but it just isn&#x27;t.

Typical startup play: charge almost nothing for a decade or longer, then raise prices or reduce offerings later on after killing almost every competing offering in the world. This time, there are still several competitors left though. One day these services that aim to replace cable will be basically identical to cable but more expensive, or else there will be a bunch of walled gardens<p>It’s like YouTube will the ad spam. YouTube wiped out every competitor who played ads or tried to monetize. Now that it stands on their corpses with a monopoly, they are pushing subscriptions and ads extremely hard, sometimes 3 ads in a 15 min video now

I really hope Netflix proves everyone wrong. HBO and Disney+ may have a huge advantage but neither seems interested in the tech side. Disney+ may be OK now (it&#x27;s been a while since I checked) but HBO Max seems to be extremely inconsistent when it comes to streaming quality. Even new, popular shows like Euphoria on HBO Max are only 1080p with a bitrate so low that the frequent, dimly lit scenes are a blocky mess. At the same time, AAA movies like Dune stream in nearly Bluray quality. Meanwhile even dumb reality shows on Netflix still stream with suburb quality.<p>IMO assuming Netflix doubles down on original content which seems to be the assumed direction, they have two strategies. Strategy one is to produce&#x2F;distribute content that is developed outside the US where production is much cheaper and existing production companies have less of an advantage. Partnering with local, smaller production outfits is probably a good strategy.<p>Strategy two is to use their tech advantage to lower the cost of content production. I&#x27;m quite surprised that we haven&#x27;t seen Netflix create a Holodeck-esque production method. <i>The Mandalorian</i> (Disney+&#x2F;Holodeck) and <i>The Witcher</i> Season 1(Netflix) have somewhat similar production costs per episode at ~$15M and ~$10M respectively but <i>The Mandalorian</i> had significantly more and better CG then <i>The Witcher</i> so clearly the Holodeck method has a lot of benefits and cost savings.<p>That said <i>Squid Game</i> only had a total budget of ~$21M, although a lot lighter on CG, strategy one offers a more cost savings.

Here in Europe netflix content&#x2F;catalog is degrading so rapidly that I have no reason anymore - since at least an year and half - to keep a subscription up, especially for what it costs now. Last time I resubscribed to look at it was in December and I just ended up watching just squid game and rewatching narcos. Nothing else interesting anymore in there, and their own IPs are mostly bad<p>I am honestly sad for how the market ended up, even if yeah, for sure now there is more competition... But I don&#x27;t want to subscribe to multiple services, it makes it all inconvenient compared to just grabbing a torrent

This is showing basic cable in the 20-30 range? What company is giving out those prices? Even at promo prices, which are going go up like crazy once the promo period is over, basic cable is still higher, and they have added costs like local broadcast station charges.

A few months back I went through my watch history on the app after thinking I hadn&#x27;t seen a good Netflix series in awhile and comparing 2018&#x2F;2019 to 2020&#x2F;2021 Netflix put out 5X less content I was interested in. There was a period where almost every weekend there was a new series dropping or a comedy special or something interesting and then it just fell off a complete cliff. Understandably covid impacted productions but somehow other streaming networks seemed to do much better.<p>Netflix&#x27;s position on cancelling shows on a whim is also extremely frustrating. It&#x27;s also completely bizarre to me that they (or really any streaming service) don&#x27;t seem to be willing to even try to create any quality sitcoms despite paying fortunes to license all the good ones from the past 20 years and these clearly having massive value from a re-watchability perspective on a platform compared to a watch it once drama series.<p>Also I don&#x27;t understand why the user interface particularly on AppleTV particularly around new shows is basically straight up hostile to the user. Just show me a damn feed for new content (this is one of the most insane trends in tech lately of refusal to have a time series feed of content (Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, etc). Netflix will show under &quot;New&quot; stuff that came out months and months ago and at the same time a new season will come out of a show they know i&#x27;ve watched previous seasons of and it won&#x27;t even be the first thing on my feed.<p>Now in December for the first time in ages they actually had some good content to buy back some goodwill after being so bad for nearly all of the pandemic and what do they do... immediately jack up prices. Insanity.

Er if you look at their charts, it looks like in absolute value, netflix didn&#x27;t raise prices faster (the article does a good job &quot;omitting&quot; the average price of cable in 2011). It&#x27;s because it was cheaper in the first place that the percentage is higher.<p>The extrapolation in the chart is laughable.<p>Not defending netflix, but this article is an insult to the reader.

Yes, but article calls out some big differences that the headline skips…<p><pre><code> even with Netflix’s recent price increase, the company’s standard plan is still only about half the price of a typical basic cable plan and arguably offers more value with no advertising and a lot of original content that doesn&#x27;t appear on TV.</code></pre>

Canceling is so easy. This future is the one I wanted.

I figured the best way to purchase is to subscribe for one month, watch all you want, and then stop. Repeat when new series that you are interested in show up again.<p>Again I really think this business model is stretching for them. I would rather to subscribe on a full catalog of all classic movies and Documentaries before the year 2000 and I can subscribe that for many years.

Netflix needs to figure out how to put out good content that people actually want to watch.<p>I cancelled when they thought that rebooting Masters of the Universe, turning it into feminist propaganda, and then having Kevin Smith lie about the content, was a good idea. I don&#x27;t give money to companies who actively trash the things I like for woke points.

I trust their data scientists calculated their price elasticity and their marketers did lots of A&#x2F;B and focus groups so they know what they&#x27;re doing.

Netflix will be probably be the cable &quot;channel&quot; I think of canceling last, for the simple reason that their usage ergonomics are stupidly simple.<p>When I go to the Netflix app, I have a simple value proposition – pay money for viewing, <i>in any country across the world if it&#x27;s a Netflix original</i>, and without any add-on crap. The only thing they did wrong was autoplaying previews, and I hope whoever was responsible for that has been fired, or at least demoted.<p>Competitor streaming services refuse to implement this basic, simple model of content consumption for some reason. They seem determined to be Yahoo! in comparison to Netflix&#x27;s Google-like simplicity. Here are some examples of my usage, with a bit of light ranting about pain points thrown in.<p>[Amazon Video]: Makes me think about whether to rent or buy from them, or whether buy a Showtime &quot;add-on&quot; (yay, more subscriptions within this subscription!). Also, a lot of the content is moving to some sort of ad-supported &quot;IMDb TV&quot;. Good luck with that, I&#x27;m out. Lots of content restrictions when outside the US (admittedly a niche use case). Oh, and they have autoplay on some content that I can&#x27;t figure out how to turn off.<p>[HBO Max]: Makes (or used to make) me log in through my cable provider. Huh, why is this streaming service asking me about my internet provider? I cut my cable package a year ago, and haven&#x27;t gotten around to re-subscribing to HBO Max; I don&#x27;t really miss any of the shows enough.<p>[Hulu]: Close to the Netflix experience, except it makes me think about ad-supported v&#x2F;s ad-free versions. I don&#x27;t want to feel bad about losing money for not watching ads. Also, doesn&#x27;t work outside the US (admittedly a niche use case).<p>[Disney+]: Not much of a pull if you don&#x27;t have kids, but if you do, I imagine that this is closest to the early-2000s Netflix experience, but for kids.<p>[Peacock]: More ad-supported nonsense, plus my cable provider is trying to push a &quot;free&quot; subscription to it in exchange for installing one of their weird devices on my network. No thank you, and please be more mindful of the environment before contributing to e-waste in landfills with your horrible devices. I would do it if I wanted to re-watch The Office, but I managed to finish it before it was leaving, guess what, Netflix.<p>[Apple TV]: I...don&#x27;t understand why people give <i>Netflix</i> a hard time about surviving on original content when the only good things about this streaming service are Ted Lasso and <i>maybe</i> Foundation. Watched those on a free subscription, hard pass for everything else. Is this the best that the most valuable company on Earth can manage about media?

Something I’ve found interesting with cable vs. streaming services is that when cable was the only option, people didn’t like that you had to get the sports package to somehow get the history channel. In addition to this, it’s extremely difficult to turn on and off access to certain cable packages because you’d need to call them. Now though, we have the content split up very piecemeal and I now hear complaints that “there are too many streaming services”. It seems like we got what we asked for as a market but the model is still flawed.

I often wonder why Netflix is willing to pay so much for the Office and Friends but isn&#x27;t trying to make a new show like that. Every new show is an 8 episode season of &quot;prestige&quot; TV.

I really question the Netflix strategy. When they started streaming, they had something very unique —- a large streaming user base and the technology to deliver them videos. They could have built a big platform business where everyone funneled their content through there and Netflix took a cut off the top.<p>Instead they licensed the content outright giving the studios the incentive to compete, now everyone has the technology to deliver streaming video and Netflix is competing on content where there have been tons of incumbents for 100 years.

Sadly the value of having a Netflix sub has gone downhill the last couple years.<p>They have the issue of releasing some really good shows but only add new seasons after several years of doing nothing with the IP.

I wonder how long it will be until they reconsider their &quot;disc by mail&quot; approach.<p>Bear with me a bit: one of the largest complaints I hear from people is the fragmentation, that is, if you have a particular section of content, you need a particular subscription. Many people are fine with &quot;whatever is on these <i>N</i> services I have&quot; but others are not. They want a particular film or show.<p>Blockbuster is gone, but for one store in Oregon. Redbox has managed to skim off the top of any rentals. Family Video has apparently pivoted to selling discs at some very reasonable-looking prices. This leaves Netflix as the sole group that could work on distributing the &quot;long tail&quot; of movies that are not in the cream skimmed off by Redbox.<p>I have never used it myself, but I have heard secondhand that Netflix has been neglecting this segment, letting the waiting lists for desired movies become longer and longer. It may simply be inherently unprofitable. However, if it is only <i>relatively</i> unprofitable, they may turn this around and refresh the service. One of the bigger problems with it is that the discs all eventually die, so something that only had a few thousand copies made will eventually just vanish, as mishandling kills one disc after another.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to think about it. I will admit that I am one of those &quot;I want to see <i>this</i>, not &#x27;whatever is available,&#x27; but this particular thing!&quot; viewers, but perhaps my segment of the population is so small as to just not be worth it.

Netflix has no significant cash flow from other channels.<p>Many competitors, like Disney (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+), Amazon (Amazon Prime Video), WarnerMedia (HBO), Apple (Apple TV+), ... can fund streaming wars (=exchange profits for market share) with their cash flow from other sources for long time if needed.<p>If you count every streaming service as separate, Disney has already more market share than Netflix in the US.

&gt; Netflix’s quarterly subscriber growth<p>Isn&#x27;t netflix big enough to no longer focus on growth? Is there some mantra among tech companies that the second you stop growing, some up and coming competitor will eat your lunch?<p>Don&#x27;t they have enough subscribers that if they offer enough quality content to retain them, their business can do well on any horizon?

Any Swiss people in this thread?<p>I am curious if the new law that prevents companies from auto redirecting to a Swiss page with higher prices would require Netflix to let Swiss people purchase the subscription for example in the US where it costs less? The new law also forbids companies from blocking the use of Swiss credit cards on non Swiss sites.

It makes sense as cable is no longer an interesting offering at all. We don&#x27;t like to sit down at a certain time anymore just because some show is starting. That&#x27;s so 1985 :) And the &#x27;watch later&#x27; options are usually only available for a couple weeks here.<p>In fact I gave up my live cable 4 years ago and haven&#x27;t missed it. I only have internet now. I had a service to watch some channels over the internet but cancelled it in 2020 because of covid as there were only doomsday talkshows left. And since that time I didn&#x27;t miss it at all. Don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll ever go back to live TV. All the news I can get more easily on a webpage.<p>Having said that the level of fragmentation in video streaming services right now is ridiculous. Eventually the industry will just make piracy mainstream again.

I think the fact that Netflix has been increasing prices faster just means they have had greater pricing power than cable cos. …and, arguably, if Apple, Disney, and the others hadn’t come to market, Netflix would have been raising prices even faster.<p>If you think how much you are currently paying for the “content” component of your cable subscription, that’s no surprise Netflix is finding that pricing power.<p>With the likes of LG and Samsung even making their own channel offering available for free (at least on mid&#x2F;premium TV sets), if Netflix, HBO, Disney, Apple keep raising prices, I suspect the first thing consumers are going to want to do is to stop paying for content from cable cos. (and keep all the premium subscriptions)

I wish Netflix understood how tone-deaf their engineering blog can come off. They frequently tote how they&#x27;re &#x27;saving bandwidth&#x27; with this optimization or that optimization. If you have a mid-range or better TV and care about quality, you&#x27;ll notice pretty quickly that their bitrates are abysmal.<p>I get it, they are responsible for a lot of bits flying through the matrix and they need to be smart about it. But I expect quality to remain the same or get better over time, not get worse. It&#x27;s not engineering at that point, it&#x27;s accounting.

I too notice the drastic decline in content quality.<p>I normally watch one episode per day of...something. Before, this relatively low usage meant I got to watch pretty much only excellent shows and could barely keep up with them.<p>Now, even with this low-ish usage I&#x27;m struggling to find the next show to watch. I already have to dig deep below my standards. I can&#x27;t imagine what garbage heavy users are watching.<p>There&#x27;s this general trend towards pulp content. No imagination, proven formulas, terrible writing, shallow, woke and &quot;safe&quot;.

I canceled my Netflix subscription and went all-in with Disney+. I rarely find interesting things to watch on Netflix, my kids watch Disney+ most of the time and I get Prime Video for free.

I don&#x27;t mind the price increase for Netflix, we get good value out of it, especially for my family that uses the service a lot.<p>However, most of the original series I watched from Netflix are cancelled now and that&#x27;s why I don&#x27;t like or trust their offerings, I usually don&#x27;t have free time and when I want to spend it watching something I just don&#x27;t want to watch something half-baked and cancelled.<p>Hopefully the Witcher doesn&#x27;t get the same treatment but hey! history always repeats itself.

Netflix has by far the best UI but the same can&#x27;t be said about content. When you start using a streaming catalogue app like JustWatch, the UI becomes less important and content becomes the main focus. I think content is what we are looking for at the end of the day, right?<p>It&#x27;s getting hard to justify Netflix price because they have a great UI and a few interesting shows. IMO, the best bang for your buck today is Prime Video, Disney+ and CuriosityStream, all wrapped up by JustWatch.

Are there any streaming services of video, beyond youtube, the BBC and national broadcasters, that don&#x27;t use DRM? I&#x27;ve been interested in looking around this space, but I won&#x27;t buy a product with DRM. The closest thing I&#x27;ve found is the excellent www.arte.tv, but that&#x27;s mostly a documentary, dance, classical music and generic &quot;cultural only&quot; platform (funded by the EU).

That&#x27;s fine. With one, (still) cheap subscription I&#x27;m entertaining people in three different households right now. It&#x27;s well worth it. I don&#x27;t even like much of the content on Netflix anymore, I&#x27;m just glad I can entertain so many people without three cable bills.<p>When they take away multi-household family support, I&#x27;ll either cancel or pass the buck to someone else.

My Netflix account goes way back to the mid 2000s. I just cancelled it over this price increase. I&#x27;m definitely not getting $22 (Premium + tax) of value from Netflix every month. They just don&#x27;t make all that much good content. My go-to is still HBO (and not &#x27;HBO Max&#x27;), whose production quality I would have preferred Netflix to emulate.

Call me when Netflix costs $100&#x2F;month and has ads after every 2 minutes of content. I mean, its sad to see Netflix slowly getting worse, but don&#x27;t forget what kind of hot garbage cable is.<p>Keep in mind you can rotate streaming services. You can basically have a never ending buffet of content for $10-15 bucks a month.

Most of the contents is mediocre at best, but I feel that it&#x27;s absurdly cheap. Every once in a while there&#x27;s a quality show or old film there. If you watch 10 hours a month it&#x27;s a bargain, and I&#x27;m guessing a lot of people watch 10 hours a week or more, especially in the US.

Netflix needs to fire and retool their current content production leadership; they&#x27;re killing their product. They then need to stop allowing their productions to be written by inexperienced writing teams (Cowboy Bebop suffered from this acutely, look up the IMDB resumes).

While I think streaming platforms are still a better experience than cable ever was, one thing that is really irritating is that I have to have half a dozen services if I want to watch a variety of content.<p>IMHO, the cable model of having all (most) content in one place was nice at least.

I wonder how much is companies playing on the expectation of inflation. Inflation is a mass psychological phenomenon - if people expect prices to rise, they do, and also businesses can raise them with less loss of sales volume.

Almost as fast as their library is shrinking!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.soda.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;netflix-movie-library-shrinking&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.soda.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;netflix-movie-library-shrinking&#x2F;</a>

If Netflix increases their price, than so can their competitors. And many people are now subscribed to multiple services instead of just one. In practice, this is not a 2X increase in 10 years — it is 5X.

So, my family shares their subscriptions. One pays for Netflix, another Youtube and the other Hulu. We all just keep it running on our end while the others mooch off each other&#x27;s accounts.

To be fair part of the reason that it&#x27;s price is rising faster than cable is because cable is more expensive. To a large degree they are catching up to where cable is.

I can&#x27;t believe they increased the price of the top tier as well. It was already expensive and IMO the lower tiers are useless - it&#x27;s the illusion of choice.

We found that we were not watching much on Netflix. We dumped it, replaced with Discovery+, and have been happy with that for the past 12 months.

Rewatching Xfiles on Disney+ to my personal taste the show is so much better than a lot of current shows.

Huh, interesting. Netflix recently <i>slashed</i> its prices in India, that too by a considerable margin.

For a lot of people (including me) our simple response sounds something like: “yo ho yo ho…”

They have a product people want, unlike cable. This is market forces working as designed.

netflix is a logo of shame for me. if i see a new show or movie with that logo i just feel it&#x27;s not worth my time.<p>kind of a reverse of the old &quot;nintendo seal of quality&quot;, the &quot;netflix seal of analytics-based-tv-by-committee&quot;

And I&#x27;d still rather have Netflix than basic cable 30 years from now as well.

We are back to a point where you’re better off buying shows and movies a la carte.

Cable is already very high.

Yeah.<p>One more price hike this year and I&#x27;m out.<p>Their own content is shit for the most part.<p>Don&#x27;t need it.

Sure, but you can share you account with 3 other households.

Why doesn’t Netflix explore adding ads to their viewing experience?<p>Yes, I wouldn’t like ads, but cable’s revenue model is subscription plus ads, so I’m curious why Netflix thinks their optimal revenue model would be any different?

No ads, so it’s still much better than cable to me.

Yeah, let&#x27;s extrapolate 20 years from now.

When I first signed up for Netflix it was (briefly) $8&#x2F;month. At that stage it had a great catalog of old TV shows, which was (and is) way more interesting to me than movies. I actually figured that anything less than $10&#x2F;month and I&#x27;d subscribe to it forever without thinking about it.<p>But the prices keep ballooning while the catalog keeps shrinking to the point that Netflix HD is now more expensive than HBO Max. Like WTF? For the record, the UI&#x2F;UX of HBO Max is decidedly worse than HBO Now was (IMHO).<p>I support Netflix&#x27;s strategy of having to make original content as the popularity of streaming caused every content owner to launch their own shitty &quot;me too&quot; streaming platform. Most of these won&#x27;t survive (eg CBS All Access -&gt; Paramount+).<p>But Netflix has proven once again you can&#x27;t solve a problem by simply throwing tons of money at it. HBO is good at producing original content because it has a long history of doing so and has built up a culture to do just that. But Netflix acts like they&#x27;re just throwing money around (eg [1]). Some of their content is good (eg Ozark). A lot of it is mediocre and samey. Even some of the good stuff gets killed prematurely.<p>So once Netflix was an &quot;always have&quot;. Now it&#x27;s something I&#x27;ll sign up for 1-2 months a year to catch up on old content. I&#x27;m not paying for 6 different streaming services continually. The only service in my &quot;always have&quot; bucket now is Prime Video simply because Amazon Prime is too useful not to have it.<p>What I think Netflix should&#x27;ve done is concentrated in building regional content and then dubbing that to other languages and regions. They&#x27;ve had some success with that (eg Money Heist, 3%) but nowhere as much as they could have (IMHO). This should help avoid creating samey content.<p>But here&#x27;s how you know this isn&#x27;t a high-priority strategy: for some reason all the voice acting on dubbed content is beyond terrible. This goes beyond Netflix. Like Netflix has some other dubbed Spanish TV series (I forget the name) and there are common voice actors with Money Heist. And they&#x27;re <i>bad</i>. Years ago I saw German-dubbed Friends and I couldn&#x27;t get past how bad the dubbing was.<p>Why is this? Is this a small industry rife with nepotism? Or is it just something no one cares about?<p>Anyway, I&#x27;m not surprised Netflix is struggling to retain subscribers in the US and Canada. It&#x27;s simply too expensive and there is now fierce competition.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cheatsheet.com&#x2F;entertainment&#x2F;gilmore-girls-paid-20000-use-john-lennon-song-memorable-rory-dean-moment.html&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cheatsheet.com&#x2F;entertainment&#x2F;gilmore-girls-paid-...</a>

Value based pricing.

Reminded me of xkcd 1102.

We&#x27;ve come full circle I guess

Yarr harr fiddle dee dee…<p>I canceled Netflix years ago on the heels of a previous absurd price hike. Somehow I still am able to watch all the shows I want. Weird!

For a company with a &quot;Culture of Reinvention&quot;, Netflix has failed to compete on the only thing that matters for a content provider...content. Apple, Disney and HBO all have better - and more curated - content. What use is there in having a slick app if all it does is deliver garbage?<p>Things like Squid Games are manufactured hits and not the kind of content one wants on the reg.