Netflix has announced that it will raise prices for its customers in some markets, actually confirming information that appeared “on sources” in the specialized press, writes Business Insider. Customers in Romania will not be affected by this decision at this time.

The American streaming giant has announced that its customers in the US, UK and France will have to fork out an extra $2 per month for its cheapest ad-free subscription (“Minimal”), which will rise from $9.99 to $11.99 in local currency equivalent .

The Premium subscription, which currently costs $19.99, will also increase in price to $22.99 per month. The good news for customers in the 3 countries is that the prices for the basic subscription with ads ($6.99) and the “Standard” subscription without ads ($15.49) will remain unchanged.

Netflix announced this shortly after publishing financial data and the number of subscribers for the third quarter of the year. On Wednesday, the US company reported its biggest quarterly increase in subscribers since 2020, which analysts attributed to the cancellation of “password sharing” worldwide in May.

The increase in subscribers led to Netflix’s revenue beating analysts’ expectations, and the company’s share price rose 12% by the end of the trading day in New York on Wednesday night.

However, the decision to raise the prices of some subscriptions suggests that the streaming giant will continue to focus on a revenue-maximizing strategy even as its customer base has grown. The strategy comes amid increasingly fierce competition in the streaming market, with giants like Disney+ and Amazon pouring huge sums into the game to increase their market share.

Netflix increases prices for “rich countries”, in Romania they remain so for now

The price hike announced by Netflix for the three markets is the first since January 2022, when the company raised the cost of its Standard subscription from $14 to $15.49 and from $18 to $19.99 for its Premium subscription.

But as for customers in Romania, they were able to take advantage of a basic subscription discount earlier this year when Netflix dropped the price from €7.99 to €4.99 in February.

News that Netflix plans to raise subscription prices for some of its customers comes after third-quarter data was first reported by the Wall Street Journal earlier in October, which cited sources familiar with the situation as saying the talks were aimed at subscribers in US and Canada, as well as “several markets worldwide.”

As HotNews.ro has since pointed out, this means that subscriptions for “rich” countries will initially be more expensive, which means that customers in Romania need not worry for now, especially since Netflix just made subscriptions cheaper here. a few months ago.

But as with password sharing, once the decision is made for some markets, it’s almost inevitable that it will come to us, although even here it’s debatable because the company has different pricing strategies for different markets around the world.

For example, since the price of a basic subscription for customers in Romania and Eastern Europe was half that of the US and other developed countries, Netflix decided not to even introduce a cheaper subscription with advertising in the markets of our region.

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