The email arrived the way they always do: polite, designed, a little proud of itself. Netflix is going up. Again. On 26 March they raise US prices for the second time in a little over a year. The plan with ads go from $7.99 to $8.99. Standard from $17.99 to $19.99. Premium from $24.99 to $26.99. Extra-member add-ons rise too. If you are new, you pay the new price immediately. If you already have an account, you get a month’s notice, which is a kind way of saying you have four weeks to decide whether you are the sort of person who notice $2.
Those are the American numbers. I see them on the news and then look at the TV at home as if the plan name might confess itself. Someone is logged in. Someone else is already logged in. A series play in the kitchen while I am supposed to be doing Maths. I could not tell you, without checking, which version we pay for. That is probably how they like it.
Netflix say there is more to watch — live events, video podcasts — and that they plan to spend $20 billion on content this year. $20 billion is a figure so large it stop being a figure and become weather. They spend that so you keep the app. Then they charge more because they spent that. I can follow the circle. I am not sure I admire it.
In class we did price discrimination, which sound colder than it feel in a living room. It mean selling the same thing at different prices to different people. The film is the same film. The difference is whether you sit through ads, and whether more people in the house can watch at once. The ads plan is cheaper because you pay with attention. Standard and Premium cost more because you pay with money to be left alone. They are not really three products. They are one product sliced so each kind of customer can be charged what they will put up with.
So the household choice is ugly and ordinary. Keep paying. Downgrade and watch the ads. Cancel and pretend the evening will fill itself with a book. I map it like a Maths problem and then feel silly, because nobody here is going to run a spreadsheet over a Sunday series. Two dollars is not a crisis. That is why it work. You do not throw out a whole habit for the price of a bus ticket. You mutter, you keep it, and the $20 billion get built on top of muttering.
I think about that more than I think about the live events. A price rise is not only greed and it is not only “more content.” It is a company testing how badly you want the thing you already open without thinking. If we cancel, we will miss something. If we stay, we will have agreed that the story is worth $2 more than it was in February.
I did the small Maths anyway, on the back of a worksheet. Two dollars a month is twenty-four a year, if you stay. Times a household, if more than one person would have paid. It is still not a crisis. It is a number you can live with, which is exactly why they pick it. The ads plan is the escape hatch they built for people who notice and still do not want to leave.
I have not decided anything, which is also a decision. I have, however, started reading the plan name on the screen. That is new. It feel like growing up, and I wish it didn’t.