The same plan that Netflix offered to Canada, unlimited streaming & no discs-by-mail for $7.99/month, is now being offered to customers in the USA. Although as of publishing there hasn’t been any mention on The Netflix Blog of the new offering, it is being promoted on the Netflix homepage. Despite being unannounced, I doubt few are surprised by the fact that this plan is now available since Canada already has it and Netflix has been stating since then that they have been testing the concept.
I can’t say that I’m too interested in the streaming only plan. Despite the updates on Monday for native apps on PS3, Wii, and Xbox, I’d rather get a disc to watch new releases. I even pay their silly upcharge to get BluRay films and wait in the queue for recent releases.
Price Increase?
If you (are a bastion for pain and) scroll through the comments of Netflix blog posts, you’ll constantly see complaints asking for more titles to be available on-demand streaming or to get new releases on disc faster.
People may soon have another thing to complain about too. Based on the information in front of my two eyes, Netflix is now offering unlimited streaming for $7.99 a month. For $2 more per month, you can get unlimited DVDs by mail. Before the new plan is offered, you can get 1 DVD at a time + unlimited instant watching for $8.99 a month. That’s only a difference of $1. There currently is no other plan that I can see offered at $9.99 a month.
This is a screenshot of the current options I have to change my Netflix plan to. Not only is there not yet the Instant Streaming-only plan but neither is there a plan at $9.99/month.
Does this mean all the current plans will be going up by a dollar? Does this mean new accounts will pay more than old accounts?
It seems we’ll just have to wait and see but I hope the addition of the streaming only plan doesn’t mean an increase for everyone else. I’ve contacted Netflix to get some clarification on the matter. I’ll update this article when I hear back.
Update:
Netflix PR got back to me last night. They probably had a busy day yesterday with the site being down for quite a while. Here’s what they have to say when I asked about the price increase:
We are always testing new approaches to the service, including a pure streaming service. We have not made any announcements regarding offering other plan choices at this time.
No confirmation or denial of the upcoming price change. Since then, the site has been updated (or reverted) to the standard $8.99/month disc+streaming option. I’ll put money on it that we’ll see this price increase before the end of the year. In fact, I’ll put $1/month on it… Just too convenient for them to have the graphics all drawn up and even accidentally slipped into the production web server.