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IPFS News Link • Entertainment: Movies

Netflix Price-Hike Backlash: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

• Eric Blattberg via WIRED.com

This movie’s getting panned, big time.

Netflix is enduring a world of hate for its price hike, which ups the cost for a combined DVD-rental and streaming plan by 60 percent. Customers and the media are having a field day taking the company to task for requiring customers to pay $6 more a month for the same, exact service.

Rival Blockbuster is loving it. The struggling video rental chain is touting its 99-cent DVD rentals for thousands of titles, and also highlights its $2.99 rentals for new releases. (But the real question when renting from Blockbuster is: If the store shuts down during the 24-hour rental period, do you get to keep the movie?)

Netflix invented the postal-mail DVD business, and its red envelopes are iconic. But the company has been steadily nudging customers to streaming, which saves huge costs associated with making, storing and shipping physical media. And people do love streaming for the instant gratification that comes from finding a movie to watch now rather than waiting days for a disk to arrive in the mail. But the Netflix catalogue of streaming movies is tiny by comparison — 20,000 versus 120,000 discs.

 

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by Lucky Red
Entered on:

Netflix price hike?  Wow, how very unexpected!   Let's all bow and give thanks to the corporations for they give us jobs and predatory fees and change our environment sometimes even for the better and they enslave us for our own good and they feed us poison because they care and...



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