Netflix are also jumping on the band wagon using inflation as an excuse to boost their profits. Seems they are scrapping the $10.99 a month plan leaving the options as $6.99 with ads or $16.99.
Netflix to scrap basic plan in Australia
We only use it for the kids but maybe we will give Stan a go or maybe dust off the ol sails.
Another price rise on the horizon probably
In all honesty I'd prefer to not give Netflix my money. For all the sub standard content they have it literally sits there as a have nothing else to watch alternative. Dropped them 3 months ago and honestly don't miss it. I think some people just csn stand the thought of not having it there. I can't help but think that at some point they will cut off all these people subbing outside of Turkey. Surely they know the subs aren't being used there. If they are all about the bottom line they will cut people off and drive them to sub in their own country. This is just another reason to not sign up with them. Their greediness will just come back and bite them in the butt at some point. At least I'm hoping it does.
They probably know that the majority wont resubscribe though.
I know I wouldn't.
We barely use it as it is. Only keep it (on the SD plan which is now up to $5/month) to save the hassle of re-activating.
Better to keep that revenue than to lose it outright.
Agreed, it costs them nothing to have you guys ($0.03c / month for bandwidth or whatever doesn't matter)
For all the sub standard content they have it literally sits there as a have nothing else to watch alternative
Well exactly this is why I was not with them for past few years. There are literally hundreds of crap shows filling up space. We don't have a lot of time for tv and with the little amount of time we have it's not browsing through them to pick something to watch.
Especially because the Turkish sub has also had a non-trivial price jump recently. That actually finally motivated me to cancel Netflix. I think for < $10 a month, I could justify having it for the (increasingly rare) times I want to watch something on Netflix. But the price jump made me realise that, even with the Turkish sub, I'd be paying $120+ to watch a small handful of shows. The value isn't there anymore for me.
(All this talk of Turkish subs has made me hungry)
TL199.99 or ~$11.30 now for 4k tier.
yeah has had a few price rise since i signed up, but still worth it just for convenience. I have all the resources needed for the high sea life but i honestly just cbf.
The missus consumes approx. 14 K-dramas a month, I cannot pirate enough to keep up.
@Nalar: Tell her K-drama isn't really that great. Wat h about 5 of them and the rest follows the same formula. Especially those romance dramas.
@gidxg03: Or if wanting to lower admin and prep, Stremio + Torrentio + Real Debrid works pretty well. RD costs a little though, ~$5 per month but I'm not sure if it's required.
Basically gives you a decent streaming app, complete with the nice interface and progress tracking.
Alternatively, there are plenty of adware filled streaming websites that work in a pinch.
I'm the same, I have both and it is a convenience of it just working. I spend some time getting the Turkish account to work and that's great but I have to always top it up with gift cards.
Still sharing Netflix with another household
Have you ever been booted? I was doing it for years with my parents but in the last 6 months I now get this primary household message and have to sign in again, that then boots the other devices not on the same network.
Read my comments below.
Same, no email, no change…. I'm happy to cancel NF in a heartbeat and any excuse will do, its only the mrs that will grizzle for a while…
Weve dumped them all except Prime (for obvious reasons). If theyre not cheap/free, then they wait until school holidays.
Outside of that, we fly the flag and recently, i even set up free international news stream through VLC (so no more paying for Sky).
(so no more paying for Sky).
Bigger benefit for you there besides $
Yep. Probably a couple of times a month.
Yep. This week alone I had 3 deliveries. I shop for the olds as well (who cant wrap their brain around it). Totally worth the money.
You're getting negged because I guess people are pretty loyal to Amazon but I agree. I dropped Prime because issues with the streaming service were giving me the shits.
I've found everything I need elsewhere, and often at better prices (especially books, weirdly). It makes me shop around properly when I used to just check Amazon and one or two other stores.
When Amazon was new/expanding and other online retailers were fat and complacent they would undercut them easily. In this landscape they have to complete with Amazon or die, so they will offer competitive prices if they can afford to.
prime selection are sub-par
i also just cancelled everything, got a good ad blocker and streaming through 123movies. frig em all
paying for Sky
LMAO
You sure run a fun house!
hey how do you stream news via VLC? any pointer? do they have all news outlets or?
There's several discussions on Whirlpool and I grabbed it from that. Have a look at this one in particular:
https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/thread/9vy5wky3?p=5
I have set this up as a VLC shortcut. Double click and it connects.
Also, if your preferred news service isn't there, you can find all majors via this:
They'll increase the price of the ad plan until it replaces this one. It's just a way of them inserting ads into a paid service that didn't used to have them.
In the early days Netflix said there will never be any ads on their service. How times have changed.
Life cycle of company, like a relationship you try really hard till you got married then coast it out
They said the same about Pay TV too. :)
I think it's pretty much following the same cycle as Pay TV did
Yep! I'm just waiting for it to go full cycle where Netflix introduce something super catchy like genre streaming, or choice passes. Otherwise known as channels.
In the early days Netflix said there will never be any ads on their service.
To be somewhat fair, you can still watch Netflix in an ad-free format.
We are borderline though. At $16.99/m for our plan, we don't watch much.
I'm one of those people known as a skipper, and Netflix's support for skipping through media is bad, so it's the high seas. I'll usually watch the first episode of a show, and if I like it, will run the one-eyed over it.
Then, there's the big insult of them removing stuff all the time as well. I get a lot of this is them not wanting to renew licensing, but still …
Corpo will say and promise anything and change it in a heartbeat. You can't trust their virtue signalling any more than you can a politicians promises.
How sure are you that they said that? I can't find a single source confirming they ever have, is it not likely you're just misremembering? They've certainly said numerous times that they don't plan to ever have ads, but to my knowledge they've never stated they definitely won't.
It would be a bizarre thing to guarantee given they can't possibly know what the media landscape would be like in 10/20/30 years time.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Personally I just wish we’d hit the common sense point of paying for what we want. I want to directly pay for the shows I want to watch at a reasonable price. If a streaming service is $10-15 a month I should be able to watch a season of a single show for $5, not $30.
Can a get a refund if the product doesn't match up with it's advertising description?
The is a perfect term for slack
pardon my french
And decent search tools and filters. I'm at the point of avoiding streaming because of the lack of control, ie their attempt to control your experience..
It's funny how people just sleepwalk with their subscriptions. Perhaps it's time this upcoming holiday season people review what they truly need in their lives.
Bang on. A lot of people just set an forget. When it's $10 a month they just can't be bothered. But I'd they looked at every sub they had they would realise how much they are spending. For casual watch once or twice a week it's just not worth it at some point there will be a tipping. Problem is there is no way but up for them..if they lose subs they will just react by increasing prices more and so the cycle continues.
That's not entirely accurate.
At some point they burn-off too much subscribers and it becomes impossible (in a practical sense) to increase prices. What you end up seeing is a phenomenon similar to a Stable Stock that's going from a bear to a crash. Businesses can run out of money fairly quickly, then not have anything to recover to, putting them into bankruptcy, acquisition, or hostile-takeover.
For many of these online or internet services, it's actually a double-edged sword. They can lose massive amounts of users in a short period, making that platform value-less or bleeding operational costs or advertising. The upside is that those businesses are usually the quickest to setup and hit the upwards trend. They're like penny-stocks in comparison.
edit: …there are some exceptions, like Nintendo which wasn't making "too much" money from the tail-end of the Wii, and the 3DS, (2011-2017) whilst it was losing money with the WiiU. A regular business would have soon gone into bankruptcy. However the Japanese employ a business tactic where they squirrel profits from years/decades past to help in a rainy-day. That's what Nintendo relied upon, before they started to become profitable again in 2018 from the NSwitch console platform.
The '$10 a month………can't be bothered' is why they were successful, they may just come undone by moving it.
I was in Canada recently, where there are very few laws around making cancelling a subscription easy. It's very common to force people call in to cancel their accounts (despite being able to sign up online) and many people with anxiety won't do that. They'd rather just keep paying the money to avoid having to do it.
I go through my credit card statement pretty often to look at what I'm really spending money on and cutting back, Netflix was an easy one to prune a few months back.
I know not everyone can do it but 2 years ago I learned and set up a Seedbox. I pay for hosting and its about $300 for the year however its automated so I can use an app on my phone to "request" what I want to download and then it appears on Plex (for me, can use other apps)
At the time I thought, I could just do Netflix, Disney, etc. But this is more convenient to have all tv/ movies in one place and for one fee a year
The days of water cooler moments chatting about last night's episode are (kinda sadly) over, so I feel no urge to see a particular show NOW.
In fact, with streamers going back to weekly episode drops, I prefer to wait and watch a full season across the course of a month anyway.
Just seems dumb to pay for stuff that has some chance of getting you in legal trouble, when you can pay a similar amount (minus a tiny amount of inconvenience) to cycle through one sub/month across the year or less if you jump on the frequent discounted/free month deals posted here.
I hold Turkish Netflix (through laziness), and we just cycle the others.
Currently on the Disney+ 3 months for $13 deal, previously on a $8/mth Binge deal for 3 months, Had a month of Amazon when I needed to buy something from them less than $39 and postage cost was higher than Prime, and have cycled through a bunch of free months of Apple TV+ as well this year.
SBS On Demand fills in the blanks, so much good stuff on there if you can get over reading subtitles.
This!
I'm currently on 2 months free of Apple TV and 3 months of Disney for $13.99. After that, I will jump on whatever is offering me a free trial. Or just watch SBS on Demand/ABC iView. Tubi is pretty decent too, for stuff to chuck on in the background, and that's free.
I'm not really home enough to make use of streaming services. I do a lot of things with my life outside the house. Plus I still have about 200 DVD's, so I can very much live without paying monthly for streaming (especially multiple services) that I barely use.
I did however pay for an extra month of Prime after my free trial was up. I thought they offered the most for the best price of all the streaming services. Probably would pay for random 1 month periods here and there in the future. And probably timed with if I needed anything shipped from Amazon.
Sell seed box subscription to people?
I don't do this, but family and friends do have a login.
you get ufc events? Brother?
My BIL has something similar, he pays a guy in the US a subscription fee and theres this whole library on Plex, and if he wants something then he can request the guy to upload it. He hates it though as its based on US servers so it's slow.
I set up Kodi + Real Debrid at around $50 a year and its awesome. Some people dont like the fact that they are paying for 'pirated content' but hey, its convenient for me and I dont need to download and store it
Thanks I didn’t know about real debrid.
Happy to pay to have it hosted outside of Australia as well as not rely on my upload speed for the streaming / other users.
No issue with latency. Maybe the bandwidth is stretched on your BIL setup as could have many users.
$300 is a pretty hefty amount though, give Real Debrid a go, I paired mine with Fen. You can get a week pass for $5, a basic set up to try it out would take about 5 mins to set up. I make mine look like Netflix so I can get my husband used to it
Sharing still works if anyone is curious….
In Oz? Not sure how. They lock the account to a household and anyone outside gets notified they are no longer part of it. You may have the option of adding an extra user but who could be bothered at the price they are asking.
I received the initial notification and I got the main household to log into my profile once at the registered location and all good since.
I'm going to try this to see if it works.
You got the main household to log into your profile at your house or main household?
Haven't been able to watchNetflix on the TV for a few months. haha
@JimB: They log into my profile at the main household (the registered address/IP). Then the main householder will be asked if the user is travelling (or a question to that context). Click Yes and it should be unlocked.
@JimB: I also want to clarify that all these can be done remotely. Main household go into Netflix then just click on the profile you use. It know that has a different IP logged previously as such it will ask about the travelling question.
Dont need to bring your device (like Apple TV etc) to the main house address. We tried different ways to get it to work and found that the remote method works. Every profile in the account lives in a different house and so far all still good.
@KaTst3R: I share a family members Netflix account which was initially blocked when they they cracked down on household sharing but it started working again with no issue about a month ago and is no longer blocked.
@minniethemoocher: Maybe Netflix did an about face.
Did you have to advise netflix that you were travelling and enter in a code at all?
I had to, to get it working again.
I tripped over the Netflix warning and skipped it and everything is still working?! But I did get the shits with Disney recently, apparently the cough 6 families I have on it is too much for whatever tripwire exists … so now I forward the signin emails to all the families automatically. It seems to randomly sign people out but meh
The ultimate though to stick it to the man is to have a domestic internet connection (I am NZ now) and setup tunnels for "the fam" for streaming access … there is literally no way they can detect that. Asus routers have VPN director now, everyone has a Chromebox that gets redirected through me … lucky standard internet in NZ is 1Gb down 400Mb up.
Dropped netflix when they cracked down on household sharing, enjoy getting their weekly "come back and try netflix" emails. Until the give me something better value than prime they're not getting my money.
Fancy a greedy company jacking up their prices.
They are the scum who partnered with iinet to break the internet. Why would anyone fund them? Why?
Self
Quick, someone find a deal on eye patches and parrots… Hook hands and wooden legs also accepted.
What's happening at Netflix is a death spiral. As users jump ship, their subscription revenue drops. As revenue drops, they need to make it up somewhere else because share holders expect their returns.
The first thing is quality goes down. They cut shows that cost them too much to host. They need to shed overheads, and those popular shows are first on the chopping block. This has the affect of causing people to re-evaluate their subscription. It is no longer value for money because the TV shows and movies they liked and/or wanted to watch are no longer available.
This leads to part 2 of the spiral collapse. As there is little to no value on the service, people leave, thus again hurting their revenue. The next thing to do is to shed staff. Not the $12.7m guys at the top, but the $43,000 a year workers. The literal foundations of a business. With the sacking of workers, more load is shifted onto the already pressured staff that are left and they leave… This has a knock on affect on the quality of the service. The app turns to shit. Outages. Login issues. Poor quality programs being made… So, customers once again, start leaving…
The final step in this spiral is the last option. Share holders want their dividends!! So, with dwindling customer numbers, they have to make the same or more profit but with less people. The only thing left to do is to force people to pay more for an already broken and shit service with little to no good content. As more customers leave, the price goes up and up. As the price goes up, more people leave… And it gets to a point where the only people who are left on the system are the people who forgot they had a subscription or the people who clutch to the hope that "It well get better soon.." when it wont.
At that point, it will fall in a heap and/or be bought out and monopolised by one of the other big players in the market.
Very well put.
I’ve never understood how these companies operate… they would rather have 4,000 customers at $50 each than to have 1,000,000 at $3 each.
do you work for Foxtel lol …?
Probably an ex-Telstra employee
Well written but based entirely in your own fancy. Netflix has better financials than ever.
Man, it would have taken you all of 30 seconds to see that their YoY revenue has increased almost 8%… So much for a death spiral.
You should also scrap Netflix to save more money.
People are still using Netflix?
Got it purely for bluey haha
Was a loyal premium-plan customer - as soon as my rents got the account sharing message, I cancelled that shit ASAP and subbed to STAN.
This is the beginning of the end for Netflix.
With all these streaming services now it's making more sense to go back to the not so legal ways of getting stuff.
I was happy enough with Disney Plus shared with friends. But the price keeps going up and they want to stop password sharing. 100 something dollars a year just for myself to watch the new Marvel and Star Wars shows? No thanks. Simpsons was handy, but if I go the not so legal way at least I'll get the DVD commentaries too.
"Find Nemo" solves all those problems. I can only blame the countless streaming services.
Same, I'm not paying a family subscription for one person for sporadic casual viewing. IF they had enough content for me to watch daily, maybe. They need a tier that is just one screen for a few hours a week.
i basically watch 90s sitcoms more than anything else.
The sensible move from Netflix would be to have two plans:
Paid - $9.99 for all resolutions, across the household.
Free - $0 for basic resolution, with ads.
They simply do not have the content value to demand more, and Prime is less than this.
4K consumes a metric ton of additional storage and bandwidth, someone has to pay.
Despite having an enormous TV, I only pay for the HD plan and upscale. (not via Aus)
Prime have the right idea, a lot of their HD content is HDR. Personally feel HDR has the biggest impact vs resolution.
Turkish sub mate