The email arrived the way they always do: polite, designed, a little proud of itself. Netflix is going up. Again. On 26 March they raised US prices for the second time in a little over a year. The plan with ads goes from $7.99 to $8.99. Standard from $17.99 to $19.99. Premium from $24.99 to $26.99. Extra-member add-ons rose 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 notices $2.
Those are the American numbers. I saw them on the news and then looked 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 plays 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 said 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 stops being a figure and becomes 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 sounds colder than it feels in a living room. It means 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 mapped it like a Maths problem and then felt silly, because nobody here is going to run a spreadsheet over a Sunday series. Two dollars is not a crisis. That is why it works. You do not throw out a whole habit for the price of a bus ticket. You mutter, you keep it, and the $20 billion gets 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 picked 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 feels like growing up, and I wish it didn’t.