[mmanfrin]

I think this has been a long time coming. $8 a month is very, very cheap for legal streaming video. Single episodes cost $2 or $3 when bought outright, and Hulu Plus exists at the same price point but with a tremendous amount of ads (getting near to broadcast-level). It has been an absolute bargain for a while, and will remain so at $10/m, in my mind.

[toomuchtodo]

> $8 a month is very, very cheap for legal streaming video.

Media pricing is subjective. Yes, its cheaper than buying outright on iTunes; but its still more expensive that pirating it. It'll make a great pricing experiment.

Everyone values content differently.

EDIT: Easy on the downvotes y'all. I don't pirate my content, I'm saying people will.

[chc]

Any price is more expensive than pirating it. Nobody is going to compete with piracy on price.

[arbitrage]

Personally, I find the most interesting thing is that the quality of pirated content is often superior to that aquired by legal means.

If the legal distributors can't compete on price, and refuse to compete with quality or convenience, what else have they got?

[jpollock]

Actually, there are substantial secondary benefits to going legal. Giving back to the creator, guaranteed quality, avoiding legal entanglements, cheaper traffic, higher speeds, etc. All things that aren't typically offered by pirated content providers.

The problem is that legal sources have issues around trying to controlling when/where/how the content is viewed, which might be the majority of the value in the media (over and above the content itself).

[toomuchtodo]

> Giving back to the creator

Does the creator truly win out when the content is paid for? I'm using music as an example; not sure how its panning out on the Netflix/video side.

> guaranteed quality

Can you always reliably get 1080p from Netflix? Because you can from TPB.

> avoiding legal entanglements

Which is now a moot point considering the number of judges who have indicated that an IP address in a log can't be tied to a specific end user.

> cheaper traffic, higher speeds

Again, as with quality, I think this depends on your ISP. You'll only get frustrated so many times with Netflix rendition switching or buffering before you'll fire up your bittorrent client, let it suck down 10-20 episodes, and watch at your leisure.

[toomuchtodo]

Arguably, you can compete on price (Hulu).

The ads model works as long as its not too painful. 2-3 ads/show? Reasonable. 12+ ads per show (because you're addicted to ad pricing on broadcast, and for the love of god please can't we get that on the web)? Pirate Bay.

[ams6110]

It's cheap, but I wouldn't pay much more for it. There really is very little I find worth watching on Netflix. A couple of TV series, and few random other things. I hardly ever watch a movie.

[chc]

Well, hopefully the increase in prices will allow them to compete a little better for the good content (either buying what's already out there or producing more of it themselves).

[gibybo]

If it had 90% of movies and TV shows (weighted by popularity), I'd easily pay $100/month. Of course I could get it all for free by pirating it, but not having to would be tremendously more convenient.

[subdane]

Agreed. I'd pay a couple bucks more a month for twice the selection. I'm a film nut and love a lot of old titles that aren't available. My Disc queue is way more interesting than my streaming queue

[abrowne]

If they added more older/rarer/foreigner films I'd happily pay more than they charge now (vs. not subscribing currently)!

[moonka]

I wonder if the reason they don't have a lot of the older films is due to the fact that digital rights were never fleshed out? If so, I'd be curious to know if that's the type of thing that can be resolved (and how).

[abrowne]

That's always been my suspicion, and it's probably worse the further in time and space you move from Hollywood. So, beyond the most famous examples, older foreign movies will probably never appear.

[SoSquidTaste]

The missus was pretty shocked that Spotify Premium costs more than Netflix. Once she brought that up, I actually thought about it and absolutely agree.

$7.99/mo had that perfect impulse-buy attraction to it, and got me into the game. But after using it and seeing the kind of content they've been building (even despite the content that they've lost, and will contractually have to lose later), $10/mo still seems pretty palatable to me too.

[arbitrage]

This is really a false equivication.

The price of $2 or $3 per episode does not itself justify that the cost of Netflix streaming should increase.

I could create an alternative service that charges $50 or $100 per episode, and the existence of such an absurd service does not itself imply that Netflix should charge $20/month.

[rargulati]

Absolutely agree.

Recently, I've been really impressed by the quality of the streams I'm getting from hbogo vs typical show on Netflix. Hopefully this allows Netflix to push higher quality streams down the pipe.

Or there is a magical setting I'm missing...

[gibybo]

It's unlikely to be the cause of your quality issues, but there is in fact a magical setting for stream quality in the Netflix player. With the player open (but not fullscreen) and streaming a video, press ctrl+alt+shift+s to select bitrate.