Shares of Netflix plunged 37% Wednesday morning after the streamer reported earnings Tuesday evening that showed it lost subscribers for the first time in more than ten years.
The company cites "competition" (true) and "easing pandemic restrictions" (true) among the causes of the subscriber losses. It was a no-brainer bet that a bunch of people who tried out Netflix when they couldn't go out to movie theaters, or for that matter anywhere else, would decide it wasn't all that once the lockdowns and closures faded away.
And prices are a thing too. Later in the story, it's mentioned that "considering a lower-priced ad-supported tier and suggested a crackdown on password sharing is coming."
I might go for that lower-priced tier. If it was just me who used Netflix, I'd have dropped it some time back, because I hardly ever do use it these days. But a couple of family members use it quite a bit, so we still have it.
I've been a Netflix subscriber since, IIRC, 1999 or 2000 -- pretty much the instant I noticed that I could get DVDs sent to me in the mail and just send them back when I was done instead of having to buy them or go to a video store (remember those?). I've always loved it.
When they went to streaming, I subscribed to the "standard" plan. They raised the price on "standard" in 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2019. And on the "basic" (which, IIRC, the introduced in 2014 as an alternative to the "standard" hike) in 2019. Now I'm on the "basic" plan.
Netflix is in competition with a lot of other streaming services these days. Every time their prices go up, some of those other services look more attractive. But I'm still with them.
For now.
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