Netflix is starting to raise prices in some countries as growth spurred by its crackdown on password sharing starts to fade.

The film and TV streaming giant said it had already lifted subscription fees in Japan and parts of Europe as well as the Middle East and Africa over the last month.

Changes in Italy and Spain are now being rolled-out.

In its latest results, Netflix announced that it had added 5.1 million subscribers between July and September - ahead of forecasts but the smallest gain in more than a year.

  • See, the problem with publicly traded corporations is, they’ve got to constantly not only be making as much money this year as they did the previous year, but they’ve got to increase shareholder value, which means, raising prices, or reducing the product to save costs, we have termed that last bit enshitification. I mean, they don’t HAVE to, but if they choose not to, the board of directors will push for a change in CSUITE personnel, and those fuckers are raking in the big bucks, and really really like their 3rd vacation homes in Aspen, so you pay more, or you get less, and sometimes you pay more AND you get less. And the beat goes on.

    • I don’t see what would be wrong with a world where businesses just satisfied themselves with providing employees with a reasonable living, contributed to the communities they were in, and provided a good or service that was needed. Sitting under a tree and reading a book sounds better than watching the world burn in your name-brand clothes and 5 bedroom 2.5 bath house.

        •  DdCno1   ( @DdCno1@beehaw.org ) 
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          In the real world, communism also suffered from the mandated growth problem, as well as a long list of other issues that some people still like to pretend solely exist under capitalism and some serious problems that are exclusive to this system. Yes, it is actually bad, with and without Cold War propaganda making it sound both worse and better than it actually was. It failed everywhere for a reason.

          This doesn’t mean that there aren’t real issues with capitalism as well. So far, the best system we’ve come up with as a species is heavily regulated capitalism with strong social safety nets. Not perfect, but nothing is on this rock.

          • So far, the best system we’ve come up with as a species is heavily regulated capitalism with strong social safety nets

            And for quite a lot of human history the best system we had come up with was Feudalism, until we started doing something better.

            Just because Capitalism is the best we’ve come up with so far doesn’t mean we should just accept it, or that 1000 years from now people won’t look at the Capitalism with the same disdain we look at Feudalism.

            • There’s a reason I said “so far”. I’m open to the idea that there might be newer and better systems in the future. So far though, they haven’t been invented yet.

          • The fact you didn’t get the guy was referring to the scare of Communism, rather than advocating for communism, and you immediately went into post hoc rationalisation mode is the best evidence to how accurate his comment is. Furthermore it is an excellent reflection of modern US society. You yanks would rather cut your nose to spite your face than to grow a modicum of empathy for the human condition.

                •  DdCno1   ( @DdCno1@beehaw.org ) 
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                  My great uncle (who was 12 at the end of WW2) had to hide from the Soviets for years, caught pneumonia and almost died before he managed to escape over the Iron Curtain. He suffered from serious health complications for the rest of his life. His mother was murdered on the spot, his teenage sister abducted into the Gulag system. She died somewhere in the Ural mountains, never to be heard of or seen again.

                  You on the other hand feel smug and smart about yourself by using entry level college vocabulary on a topic you know less than nothing about. There are few people on this planet I detest more than those who are, for whatever reason, carrying water for authoritarians and authoritarian systems.

      • Specifically, the Board and thus the CEO must maximize company VALUE not profit.

        There are other ways to increase company value that do not necessarily result in Q/Q / Y/Y profit increases.

        But in the 1970s you get a guy named Milton Friedman who comes along with the concept of shareholder value in a 1970 essay for The New York Times, entitled “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”.[5] In it, he argued that a company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders.

        So there’s been a lot of argument against it since esp as of late, but the economic hegemony still adheres to Friedman’s economic principles.

          • A bigger market share (or just market size if it’s something new-fangled) at the expense of current profit, because that can turn into future profits. See most modern tech companies, which make a loss but still have value. For example, Uber just made a profit for the first time, and since they’re everywhere that’s a great position for a shareholder. People bought in in the past in hopes that this would eventually happen.

            OP is a little off, BTW. US law - and it’s probably the same elsewhere - says that the C-suite has to work in the interests of shareholders, who they represent as fiduciaries. It’s just that there’s only a few things a million APPL shareholders have in common, so in practice that interest is value and dividends. In a privately-owned company other things might factor in, for better or for worse.

            IANAL

    • TBF small businesses do this too on average. There’s some that don’t, but then there’s also some that straight up do crime, usually against employees.

      To solve this, you either want a well-regulated market, or no market (however that would work).

        • That’s generally false. But even if it’s true, all the boss has to do is argue that medium-term profits will be generated by whatever policy they want to adopt. Since nobody knows the future, they might be right, and they’re legally rock solid.

          In other words, the duty to increase value produces unfalsifiable policy claims. So it is meaningless.

        •  megopie   ( @megopie@beehaw.org ) 
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          public companies do not necessarily have a Fiduciary duty to the shareholders, let alone one to increase value. Any that they did have (based on the laws and how they are incorporated in a given jurisdiction) would also be applicable to a private company. Private companies also have shareholders, the shares are just not traded publicly.

          You’re probably thinking of the theory of “Shareholder Primacy” but that is a theory not a legal reality, although some insist it is based on a questionable interpretation of the precedent set by dodge vs ford motor company.

          Public companies can be run in what ever way the board/shareholders see fit.

      • It’s all about who owns it and is sitting on the board.

        Bunch of old money type people? They don’t care too much about a bad year, more important to weather the storms and keep the generational money intact.

        Venture capitalists? Jack Welch this dogshit company and get us some short term gains!

    • I keep telling my friends this. It was incredibly simple to do. And you can start with only a couple smaller 1 or 4 TB drives and still end up starting a decent collection

          • I would recommend “spending” about 6 GB on a 1080p x265 encoding of a movie, if you can. The quality is much better, good enough to be viewed up close on a large screen, unless there’s a large amount of high frequency detail, like in recent animated or very CGI-heavy movies - or unless it’s an older film with strong film grain and/or large mass scenes (think Lawrence of Arabia). Those do benefit from higher bitrates and resolutions, even if your screen isn’t 4K.

    • These owners forgot that media is 100% discretionary spend AND has superior alternative that can be had close to free and a bit of labour…

      I know owners thinks we are all brain dead and only able to consoom… Is we tho?

  • Netflix’s content has gotten so much worse too. I don’t think there are many people left that have a subscription for more than one or two shows. And this seems to be a trend across all the different apps. Makes me glad I set up automatic torrenting for everything I’m interested in, and all it costs me is $5/month for Proton VPN

  •  shirro   ( @shirro@aussie.zone ) 
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    They cancelled one too many shows we liked a long time ago and we swore off Netflix for life. Never going back. If they ever make another good show I will wait awhile to see if they cancel it or ruin it before I go get it from somewhere else. They burned a lot of their old loyal customers that made them a success and now they have to acquire new customers faster than they lose them which isn’t sustainable.

  • The company is under pressure to show investors what will power growth in the years ahead, as its already massive reach makes finding new subscribers more difficult.

    LOL i think the only potential “new subscribers” remaining are the people who never had and never will have a netflix sub. at this point one of the many reasons i’ll never sign up is because fuck shareholders in general

    • Just idea that they expect growth where there is none is strange. This business are at the limit and have no way to grow faster than economic situation of many people around the world gets better.

      Sad part is fir them it is better to destroy service trying to increase growth in meaningless ways, than to just find a way to keep the business that is working.

      Idea of infinite growth is ruining us.

  • The for profit model was probably created by idiots. Just because something like the market and economy are complex doesn’t mean it was put together by smart people.

    Capitalism is cannibalism. Cannibalism of resources, of your job, of your society.

    Idiots put the system together and idiots are holding it together.

        • No, vapourware. If their thing worked but also had remote prisons this would be a totally different (and ethically abstract) conversation, so that’s not the important detail.

          In practice, their thing didn’t work, and still ran on market-style money transactions, albeit with multiple currencies and a lot of random red tape. And then a huge unofficial market cropped up as well to close the gaps from it not working.

            • Modern industrial economies are really complicated. I like trains. To make trains, you need parts, labour, equipment and power. They themselves need to be made, which uses parts, labour, equipment and power, and meanwhile you have competing uses of all those things for making, I dunno, printing presses, or for completely different things like farming or art curating. If you drew it all out as a diagram it would get super interconnected super fast.

              Meanwhile, even a simple binary choice like which of two lots a rehab center should go on can be very politically complicated. Anarchists like to handwave it away with “we’ll figure it out together”, and I really don’t find that convincing.

              Markets offer a system that’s proven to work insofar as if you need to buy a train or a hair clip or lunch someone’s always selling it. How do you guarantee that, or something similar?