Netflix Tests Killing Off Its 'Basic' Subscription

Just more enshittification. Glad I cancelled last month, you don't get to tell me who is or who isn't in my household.

They're cashing out and running the brand into the ground. Sure they may technically gain some new subscribers by cracking down on password sharing but their shows will be receiving millions less views because of this and everything else they're doing. It's all typical short-sighted please the share holders bullshit.
- Is there anything for tv and movie streaming that isn't at risk of enshittification and isn't illegal? (I don't feel like getting a scary letter from my college or their ISP) ~Nai

Netflix is my go-to for streaming services. Mainly because there's a dedicated "Netflix" button on my Shield remote that I keep hitting on accident.

the only regret I have is the inability to bind my jellyfin app to my remote Netflix button.
Remap it to something that’s actually good
- Whoa--there's an app for that! https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/10/30/shield-tv-remote-remap-netflix/ Thanks!
- Remapped it to Jellyfin app on mine. Kind of ironic :)
there was a redditor that was insisting that it was Nvidia paying Netflix millions and millions of dollars for the privilege of having a dedicated netflix button on the remote, and not the opposite, Netflix paying Nvidia millions of dollars to have a sponsored button the remote
I do the same thing all the time. Need to figure out how to remap the button to load TiviMate instead.

As a side note, I really wish Nvidia would release a new Shield. I just ordered a new one yesterday because honestly, it's still the best streaming box.

Roughly $200 a year. You can buy a very large external hard drive for that price...which would be a much better investment.

Don't forget a year subscription to a vpn
I have a very high end plex server. I think all in between VPN, Usenet, hardware costs I pay roughly $60/mo. But that gets me all the content I want, organized exactly how I want it, and nothing disappears on me. No need for 3-4 subscriptions, multiple apps, etc. And that service works for my entire family and I can easily make offline copies for trips.

Now all this does require pretty significant time investment. It's less now, but there were multiple very long research sessions and troubleshooting that I had to go through. I would absolutely pay for a service that was marginally close in ease of use just to not have to be my own IT, but it doesn't exist.

I pay for streaming music. It just works and I (usually) don't feel like maintaining my own music library is worth it. I pay for all my games, because Steam just works. I pay for all my ebooks because they just work. Streaming video by comparison is hot garbage. Just a complete morass of exclusive content, shitty apps, poor user experience and stupid policy decisions.
- 100% agree.
  
  Steam works. Spotify works. These things are worth paying for because they make my life easier. When Netflix was the only game in town and had content from everywhere it was a fantastic service. Then every studio decided that they wanted all that money for themselves and started their own service. Since that time it is nothing but fragmentation, degraded service and confusion. Streaming Video seems to be in a race to oblivion.

and i'm testing the seven seas. arrr! 🏴‍☠️

Just throwing it out there that large hard drives are inexpensive and there's free software out there like jellyfin to let you play your own media on devices. Data acquisition is up to you of course but that's not particularly difficult either. So just become your own streaming service!

I just doubt 10Mbps up is enough to actually stream content. And how do you deal with the Double NAT problem? I tried just reading over samba via zerotier, but it couldn't handle 1080p, but that could be slow relays for zerotier connections.
- 10Mbps up is nowhere near enough, unless you stream very low quality (think 720p or highly compressed 1080p). High-quality 4K can get close to 100Mbps.
- I'm not sure about 10 but 20 has certainly been more than enough for Netflix-level 1080p streaming in my experience.

Guess I'll just... Stop paying for shit ever again. Already set up a nice Jellyfin server with 16,000+ movies in anticipation of this garbage move so I'm good for the next 43 years assuming one movie a day, every day.

On an unrelated note, how much data storage does it take to host 16,000+ videos? I'm curious
How did you download so much? Radarr lists?
- Mostly some custom scripts for scraping yts.mx, cross-referencing imdb for e.g. top 50/100 box office for each year (https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?year=${YEAR}&title_type=feature&) and automatically uploading to and downloading from my seedbox. Tried radarr but it wasn't really my thing. They're all basically garbage 1080p encodes but for their size they're passable enough for me, and my goal was a large library for discoverability not a small one for quality, so it worked out perfectly for that. Also been checking r/opensignups (RIP reddit) for good trackers when they have open registration for the occasional specific stuff that I want in better quality.

I presume ad-free will eventually take over with the same price, after the other 2 plans increase.

It's likely with the household changes we will see an end to the old plans that were based on screens and we will have 2-tiers, ads & no-ads.

Netflix will only get more expensive from here and the ad plan was always meant to make the 'Premium' plan look better.

I just dropped ours down to 2screens, for now..I still think we may well cancel fully. But, we'll see.
- I went 2-screen Turkish account for $4/m, works fine in Australia.

Netflix just fucking sucks now. It has killed me off it's service. We have been subscribed since 2012 and I'll occasionally search something I don't have on my home media server and the search will autocomplete what I'm typing, but not actually show the content I want. It will display some other related garbage. I can't imagine paying monthly and suffering through ads for this experience.

I'm currently testing the Netflix "Killed Off" subscription plan. 0.00 a year and ad free!

The more anti-consumer shit they pull, the more of my friends I get to join my Plex server, for marginal cost since more users barely means any more used electricity.

Yo. Can I get in on that? ;)

Cancelled Netflix. Its simply not worth it anymore.

I'm not surprised. Now that Netflix can no longer rely on cable and broadcast to produce its content for pennies on the dollar, Netflix is going to have a hard time paying for its catalog.

Heh. I (US) cancelled this morning and they tried to offer me basic as an alternative to cancellation.

We see you don't like the best version of our service how about you try the worst?

They're trying so hard to lose my patronage, but they forgot I cancelled last year.

If any company knows how to fast track their way into bankruptcy, it would be Netflix. Kudo's for them to try and improve their previous track record!

How does this comment end up under every post about Netflix? Take a look at their financials. They're doing fine. Great, even. Their decisions may be unpopular with a tiny but vocal minority, but let's deal in facts here.
- Yep their evidence shows the password sharing crackdown got them more subs overall and I'm sure they have checked this will work too. People forget the purpose is to make them money not provide entertainment to the masses.
- Yeah, I don't like it but after they came down on password sharing their subscription numbers rose, not fell. This will likely be another move that's anti-consumer but pro-investor.

I'd say they're doing a great job at killing subscriptions indeed

Crave (in Canada) did this a couple of years ago. Their premium package included shows from HBO and others. I guess not enough people were going for it so they got rid of the basic package & bumped everyone up when their auto-renewal happened. So the price switched from $99 per year to $199. I got rid of it for awhile then finally gave in.

Netflix Tests Killing itself FTFY

I regularly rotate streaming subscriptions. They all got greedy and there are too many competing services offering too little value. If any service starts locking people in to fixed terms or forcing ads I will drop that service entirely. I don't like piracy because it doesn't support creative jobs and I think it should be unnecessary if services behaved reasonably. But the one or two decent shows a year that might be an exclusive to any particular service can be obtained on the high seas or I can live without them.

All this is doing is hurting the content creators themselves. Corporations like Netflix actively harm consumers and creatives.