Good for them, I cancelled my subscription simply because Linux support is so awful. It's impossible to watch in 4k, and even with 1080p you frequently get automatically downgraded to lower res bitrate whenever the window isn't focused. Absolutely daunting.

This is a no brainer for Netflix and any other streaming service. I have NO IDEA what I pay for all my streaming, whether it comes thru a credit card/cell phone benefit or not, nor even who pays for it (e.g. me, or my partner, or someone in my extended family).

They are profiting off of my ignorance.

Why do we need to regulate how companies make their products if people are not forced to use them or are a basic necessity? Don’t like Netflix? Too expensive? Don’t buy it. Vote with your wallet.

Cue up people shouting about how this is horrible and that they're totally going to cancel, only to be followed by Netflix making even more money next quarter.

Speaking from experience, I had Netflix for years without thinking about it, starting at $8/month. At that price I didn't care if I watched it or not. Then it went to $10, $12, etc. Once it got to $15-16 (I forget), I cancelled it.

I now sign up for 1-2 months a year to catch up on shows I like and just rotate which streaming services I have. Yes, this is anecdotal.

It's hard to find data on how common rotating streaming services is. I would guess not common. I found this from 2021 showing the number of streaming services the average US household has [1]. It's worth noting that this was based on lockdown-era data.

The number if still quite high. I still have 3-4 mainly because my ISP gives me 1 and Amazon Prime bundles it. Were it not for those, I'd probably stick with 2. This is imperfect data because is it the same 4 or are some or all of these rotated? We just don't know.

Most of the data around this is how streaming is cannibalizing satellite and cable. But at this rate Netflix will cost $30+ in 10-15 years. Will it still have growing revenue and the same subscriber numbers? There is price elasticity here.

[1]: https://www.thewrap.com/u-s-households-with-4-streaming-serv...

This makes sense to me as a strategy for most users.

I cancelled a year or two ago, but not for the price changes alone. I didn't like the new interface much, and I found myself endlessly scrolling through the same things looking for stuff to watch.

I'm not sure if Netflix vastly removed most of its content, or they just made discoverability a nightmare, but it felt often like I 'ran out of stuff to watch.'

It's hard to justify 20 something a month for what is essentially a few 6 episode shows that will last one season, and maybe 4 or 5 passable movies in a year. It seems rather silly to me to pay for that all year.

Also, more people getting into pirating their content.

Pirating is honestly, by-far the least painful experience to watch things.

I recently started watching a series, and I figured I'd check if it's on any streaming services I have access to. I found it on Prime Video, but when I clicked into it, it needed some other separate subscription to a service I'd never heard of to watch it. And even then, it had like, seasons 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8 of the 9 total seasons. If there was any chance I'd subscribe to watch it before, I definitely wasn't now. I couldn't even figure out where the remaining seasons are available to be watched legally. It's especially hard to find this information in Canada because searching "X where to watch" just gives you results of where things are available in America, which has completely different licensing deals.

So I found a torrent for the complete series and I've been watching it pain-free. Piracy tends to be my default now. It even has the advantage that I can frequently find a Bluray rip rather than a reduced bitrate internet stream. Anything I really like and I want to support the creators, I purchase a physical release, or official merchandise or something.

> Pirating is honestly, by-far the least painful experience to watch things.

No it's not. It's just the cheapest. Except for a few outliers like you describe, streaming is an order of magnitude less painful.

Only if you don't know about it, but otherwise it's literally two clicks, not even sign-in required

I've been out of that scene for a long time, hasn't Netflix implemented a bunch of anti-piracy methods, or are people just recording HDMI/DisplayPort output and saving it?

It's easier to torrent stuff than to get 4K in Netflix on Linux.

Can't even get 4K on most streaming services on macOS now... It's not just Linux anymore.

Netflix lets you in Safari[1]; Disney+ limits you to 1080p[2]; and Hulu limits you to 720p[3].

[1]: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55764 ("Mac computer with an Apple processor or Apple T2 Security chip").

[2]: https://help.disneyplus.com/article/disneyplus-video-quality ("Please note 4K streaming is not available on computer browsers").

[3]: https://help.hulu.com/article/hulu-video-quality ("Hulu.com streams in quality up to 720p").

Even the 4K you get can hardly be considered 4K, awful bitrate.

Too bad most people are okay with this so it's never gonna change.

If people were not okay with it, it still wouldn’t change anything unless there was competition. There’s no incentive.

Reading around a bit, yes to Netflix adding anti-piracy measures, maybe to folks recording HDMI/DisplayPort.

Apparently, Netflix is using steganography/content watermarks in their 4k content itself to trace users who are pirating. This is from a totally unsourced Reddit thread[0] but they do reference a real company which claims to do this watermarking[1]. The claim is that in addition to Netflix requiring 4k content to be available only on platforms with Trusted Execution Environments[2], Netflix also encodes each ~10 second "chunk" of the video stream into at least 2 different versions: an Y and a Z version. Then, they serve each customer a unique series of chunks when that customer streams their content, e.g. YYZYZZZYZYYZYZYYZZYZYYZ. Then when content leaks, Netflix can examine each chunk of the leaked content to extract the ID of the user who streamed the content. Apparently, Netflix can encode a lot more than just the userID, they can also encode stuff like the individual device ID, the TEE key ID, etc.

I know you might be thinking "I could do something to defeat that" and you're probably right (e.g. take streams from multiple users and intercut them so that the bits of the watermark through time are being constantly shuffled), but I'll also bet that there's many layers of steganography we don't know about, and unless you get them all, you'll not escape scot-free.

[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1rqkyjg/with_a_lot_...

[1] - https://irdeto.com/video-entertainment/irdeto-anti-piracy

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_execution_environment

Not that I would ever pirate a movie because I'm a good boy, but I remember the Cinavia DRM that affected Blu-ray players thirteen years ago.

I'm not 100% sure how it worked, but I guess it could do a similar kind of steganography-style thing to the audio track, where they would embed keys silently and the blu-ray player would check against that.

I'm not sure if anyone actually ever managed to defeat it, I think they just stopped implementing it in streaming boxes.

I can’t lie It’s a pretty neat way to track who’s recording

are existing subscribers grandfathered in or no?

Nope.

I've been subbed since 2008 (before streaming with DVDs).

My bill has increased for each increase they introduced. The last bill for the standard 1080p no ads plan was $19.56 (before this new price update). It was about half that when I first signed up.

To be honest I'm going to cancel, not because I can't afford it but because they keep raising their prices very frequently and it has hit the point now where I'm not interested in paying more so they have lost a lifetime customer.

I find it funny how they also only show you the last 1 year of billing history. It's a nice dark pattern to not let you easily see how much prices have gone up over the years. You have to go through the account cancellation menu just to see when you first joined.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536393

I remember signing up to Netflix to watch house of cards back in the early 2010s and being absolutely blown away.

I don’t think there’s been a single show on Netflix I’ve genuinely looked forward to in the past couple of years. It’s like they completely gave up on quality content and just shovel out the most mediocre slop. I’m amazed people still pay these ever increasing prices.

Severance (Apple TV) and Fallout (Amazon Prime) are pretty amazing TV shows that came out somewhat recently. Nothing on top of my mind came out of Netflix for which I really felt the need of resubscribing.

I miss the quality of TV shows we reached with Mr. Robot, Silicon Valley, Utopia (UK), and Westworld :(

> The debt subsidies are over

So is all the content worth watching. I haven’t paid for Netflix in years.

I cancelled Netflix long ago, they started cancelling their best shows (like 1899, etc) and producing absolute garbage. I mean just look at the quality of early/peak Netflix to now. Stranger Things is a great example, the decline is visible not just in the story but in the visuals. The documentaries are also bad now, I watched the "Manosphere" at someone's house, and while you can agree with the premise that these people are deranged, it was clearly a cash grab and didn't really move the needle. Then the catalogue has been gutted, and it's just mostly garbage now. Just awful stuff.

The last truly remarkable series they had was Dark. Everything since has slid into being for low attention span people on their phones, and for that reason I no longer give it my attention, or money. I guess it's working out for them, since they keep printing money...but I think it won't last forever. Look at Disney, the decline can come quick once the cracks turn into fault lines.