Netflix Claims No More Price Hikes For at Least a Year

In this digital age, the constants in life are death, taxes, and the all-too-often price increase of your favorite streaming platform. While most streamers have increased their prices over the years, Netflix has been particularly guilty of hiking rates. Fortunately for Netflix subscribers, it looks like the platform’s current subscription rates will remain the same for the next year.

“We largely paused them during paid sharing rollout and so that’s to be expected,” Netflix chief financial officer Spencer Neumann said during the company’s earnings video on Wednesday. “For ads, that new revenue stream, we’ve expected a gradual revenue build and so that’s not expected to be a big contributor this year. So continues to be on target. So most of our revenue growth this year is from growth in volume through new paid memberships and that’s largely driven by our paid sharing rollout.”

Paid sharing, of course, is Netflix’s business verbiage for its crackdown on password sharing. Earlier this year, the platform made it so subscribers had to be on the same internet to share an account at regular rates.

“We see a cancel reaction in each market when we announce the news, which impacts near term member growth,” Netflix wrote earlier this year. “But as borrowers start to activate their own accounts and existing members add “extra member” accounts, we see increased acquisition and revenue.”

It added, “In Canada, which we believe is a reliable predictor for the US, our paid membership base is now larger than prior to the launch of paid sharing and revenue growth has accelerated and is now growing faster than in the US.”

Since paid sharing has been implemented, the company has introduced various additional controls subscribers can use to take advantage of the method.

“We’ve landed on a thoughtful approach to monetize account sharing and we’ll begin rolling this out more broadly starting in early 2023,” the company previously said in a quarterly statement. “After listening to consumer feedback, we are going to offer the ability for borrowers to transfer their Netflix profile into their own account, and for sharers to manage their devices more easily and to create sub-accounts (‘extra member’), if they want to pay for family or friends. In countries with our lower-priced ad-supported plan, we expect the profile transfer option for borrowers to be especially popular.”