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Netflix Canada just got rid of its cheapest ad-free plan without even a heads up

119 points| woranl | 2 years ago |narcity.com

99 comments

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medellin|2 years ago

Netflix also no longer works when i travel. Went on a short trip to see some relatives in another country and my netflix account is blocked. Contacted support and they said i need to pay for a new account in that country.

Netflix is really starting to lose its value for me. But I’m working on setting up a VPN at my house to tunnel all Netflix traffic through and then configure some rpis to send to family members so we can all steal from Netflix again.

At this point they have pissed me off enough that im working on making it as easy as possible for anyone to setup and sharing it when im done.

ecshafer|2 years ago

Netflix lost its value for me when they just stopped having good content. I kept it around almost out of habit, but the anti-consumer policies were the straw that broke the camels back. Their self produced movies and shows are on average, abysmal. I might put up with their practices if they made good things.

barbazoo|2 years ago

Netflix produced content has become so irrelevant for me that whenever I want to watch something I look for thumbnails that don't have the Netflix "N" in the corner. For me it's just algorithm generated junk now, it's a shame.

I wish I could cancel it but my partner wants to keep it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

AlchemistCamp|2 years ago

Wow. That’s a complete deal breaker for me. The main draw for Netflix had been that they don’t completely gut my viewing options when out of the US (which is almost always).

ricardobayes|2 years ago

They must do that for compliance and licencing reasons. Laws around regional copyrights have always been strong. They can't even show subtitles in languages weren't licenced in the country - e.g. Spanish netflix offers very few shows with English subs.

tyingq|2 years ago

>Netflix also no longer works when i travel. Went on a short trip to see some relatives in another country and my netflix account is blocked.

Is this also true if you use the "download for offline use" for travel purposes? I think I recall that I still had to be logged in to view, despite the "offline" note.[1]

[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/54816

hermitdev|2 years ago

Hasn't Netflix always been region locked? Pretty sure people using VPNs just for Netflix is a thing.

justinclift|2 years ago

> But I’m working on setting up a VPN at my house to tunnel all Netflix traffic through ...

On a technical point, you might be able to get away with just using Squid for the proxy, with pretty much default settings.

http://www.squid-cache.org

I used to use that years ago (not with Netflix though) running from a data centre, using an ssh (autossh) tunnel to reach it securely.

Worked pretty well, aside from the extra latency due to the packets having to go an extra half way around the world. ;)

kazinator|2 years ago

Netflix has always been region restricted. The real problem here is that support lied to you. Even if you got a Netflix account in that country, that country's Netflix wouldn't have the same content that you wanted to take with you. Lying to customers is deplorable.

The correct, honest answer is that when you go traveling, you cannot access your favorite Netflix content other than through a VPN that tunnels back home.

curiousDog|2 years ago

It's likely you're sharing it across households/relatives. Not sure I'd go to such lengths for something that costs as much as a Chipotle burrito tbh

gloryjulio|2 years ago

They killed all the interest shows for me. I stopped watching when they cut Santa Clarita diet. Bojack horseman was the last complete show I watched.

xz0r|2 years ago

Please open source it.

Waterluvian|2 years ago

Tangent: As much as it feels like we just have “bundles” like the bad old cable days, I really enjoy getting to change streaming providers every 2-3 months. My wife and I just Hoover up whatever we’re interested in then move on. And in a year we’ve got that service back and we Hoover up the last year’s added content that looks good.

Lots of ways to measure it but when I think about how much I pay and what my experience is like, I’m doing far better than in the cable days. I’m much happier.

eek2121|2 years ago

I gave up on that nonsense.I have a raspberry pi that rapidly pulls down new torrents for stuff and processes and/or copies it to my media center for free....which is another raspberry pi.

I've no problem paying for content (I am "upper class"), but companies, especially Netflix clearly haven't figured things out.

For Netflix, I am mostly referring to the account sharing stuff. I did not share my account with anyone, but false advertising rubbed me the wrong way, so they went from whatever their current top tier pricing is to zero from me. Other huge gripes include streaming quality and number of streams.

Barrin92|2 years ago

>My wife and I just Hoover up whatever we’re interested in then move on.

Probably saner than my chaotic good approach of having gone back to torrenting but donating a subscription worth of money to the Against Malaria foundation to ease my conscience now that I'm not a broke student any more. I can't be bothered with the obnoxious subscriptions and autplay UIs

passwordoops|2 years ago

It's the go-to strategy for us as well, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts this is the next target for some sort of crackdown

tzs|2 years ago

That's a pretty good approach, but there is one drawback that may be significant for some.

You see a movie or show and then want to talk about it with your friends and find that they've all either won't be back on the right streaming service for a new months or they've seen it months ago and aren't that interested in talking about it any more.

atorodius|2 years ago

Comment sponsored by Big Stream ;)

In seriousness, I think this is actually a neat strategy.

eduction|2 years ago

That’s really funny, I was just an hour ago reading this long New York magazine story on streaming consolidation that Pocket suggested to me which contains this line:

“ Netflix claims its Basic With Ads tier brings in more revenue per user than its standard commercial-free plan”

“More revenue” links to https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/ads-on-netflix-12....

Overall story paints a picture of the chickens coming home to roost in streaming https://www.vulture.com/2023/06/streaming-industry-netflix-m...

So I guess it’s not surprising that they would take away the least profitable plan.

hattmall|2 years ago

Ads will typically be more profitable for most things entertainment. Entertainment is generally cheap and far more profitable industries can pay more for ads than users are willing to spend.

People here are balking at paying like $10 a month for Netflix if they can't split it but likely take it as a given that you need to spend several hundreds each month for insurance.

Getting one customer on the latest aids medication can net a company 10s of thousands per year.

Drank the water at camp lejune? You may be worth millions of dollars to the right law firm.

mdm_|2 years ago

Crave recently did the same thing in Canada, got rid of their $9.99 “mobile” plan, and now the $24.99 subscription is the only choice available for new subscribers. Sucks because all I want to watch is new Star Trek series, which means paying $28/month after tax to watch about 3.5 hours of content.

ipaddr|2 years ago

I wanted to try Crave but I bought an nVidia box instead. Install kodi found some popular addons. Now I can see anything on Crave or any other network from any point in history. I'm watching season 2 of Big Brother, I'm watching shows not available on streaming services. I didn't realize this user experience and availability was possible. I still have netflix, prime, plex and cable but that might give me .1% availability

Matthias247|2 years ago

If you really like it subscribe for one month, watch it and cancel.

But the worst parts of crave seems not the pricing but that they also can’t deliver any quality. I had it for a year via a forced Telus PikTv subscription and everything looked like 480p.

I want to watch some newer HBO stuff (house of dragons) but really don’t want to use this inferior service for it.

morkalork|2 years ago

Pretty much the only thing I use crave for. They haven't been too strict on password sharing so I've been using a family member's account to watch it. In the end it may not even matter, supposedly they'll be losing the series in Canada soon.

Fire-Dragon-DoL|2 years ago

You could see that as the price of a movie ticket!

crazygringo|2 years ago

> Without Even A Heads Up

Since it only affects new users, and existing users on the plan remain, who cares about a "heads up"?

Maybe it's newsworthy that they dropped the cheapest plan going forwards, but it's not as though there's some expectation that plan changes for new members are supposed to be announced months in advance or something.

When I go to the grocery store and strawberries are now $4.99 instead of $2.99 last week, I don't complain the supermarket didn't give me a "heads up".

cortesoft|2 years ago

I mean, a ton of people complain about the rising cost of groceries.

dghughes|2 years ago

I'm in Canada and keep thinking of ditching Netflix but I keep procrastinating maybe today is the day. Or tomorrow since Monday is my billing date $24.14 for Premium.

I can't recall when I last watched Netflix. Streaming services are the gym membership of the 21st century the companies hope we forget or find it a pain to cancel.

nine_zeros|2 years ago

It just looks like the game is up. Every company is trying to raise prices and squeeze more, so that stock prices remain up.

If they could accept a lower stock price instead, they'd just be more stable, and retain loyalty on the other side of the recession curve.

dangus|2 years ago

Inflation is high. And before you say, "Record profits are causing inflation," that's only a part of the explanation. [1]

The fact is, the median-aged person was in diapers when their parents were getting double-digit mortgages. We are now looking at home loans and car loans at 7%. This is different from the last decade or two of low, stable inflation.

We should expect almost everything we buy to have significant price increases and wage increases much more frequently than we are used to. [2]

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR

[2] https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker?panel=1

2OEH8eoCRo0|2 years ago

They should have stayed private then. If you're issuing stock you better make sure it goes up or you're paying dividends or nobody will buy it.

vinyl7|2 years ago

Soon they'll learn that eventually you run out of other peoples money

graypegg|2 years ago

I get it, the ad tier probably makes a lot more revenue per-user than the ad-free basic plan. They’ve done the research (I assume) and I guess came to the conclusion that price-sensitive users will tolerate ads to save money, and the users that would have chosen basic solely because it was the cheapest option without ads will simply switch to the new cheapest ad-free option.

Either way, Netflix actually stands to make more money removing that tier.

However it’s also another barrier to me ever considering paying Netflix ever again. But we’re the minority of people.

SpacePortKnight|2 years ago

Netflix increase prices. Reddit closes down free API access. Twitter introduces subscriptions.

I've noticed that people are quick to react negatively to such news however I feel like all of these services provide a real value and they are without any real competition.

Also these services are still better than traditional alternatives. I can cancel Netflix anytime and that alone is worth to me more than anything which cable could offer.

opmelogy|2 years ago

this makes total sense. Tech really does funnel money into a smaller set of society and the way to keep doing that is to raise prices on everyone, even if that means the majority of the people that are making way less a year than their employees.

barbazoo|2 years ago

Luckily, I was able just now to switch from Standard to Basic FWIW

fefrf|2 years ago

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