In Netflix its latest earnings report for the third quarter, Netflix has some updates for our local Palm Coast and Flagler County, Florida subscribers. Beginning this past Wednesday October 18, 2023, Netflix will be implementing changes to its pricing plans in the United States.
The premium ad-free plan, which many of viewers love, will see a small increase of $3 per month, making it $22.99 a month.
For those who prefer the basic plan with just one stream, the new monthly cost will be $11.99 in the United States.
However, if you're on our ad-supported tier at $6.99 a month, there's good news for you as the price will remain the same. See image for details from Netflix website we captured Oct 19, 2023 for US Customers.
Netflix has also made similar adjustments to its pricing plans in the United Kingdom and France.
In terms of subscriber growth, Netflix has shown remarkable progress. They reported a 9% year-over-year increase in average paid memberships, with a whopping 8.8 million new subscribers added in the last quarter. This is a substantial increase compared to the 2.4 million new subscribers during the third quarter of the previous year. In total, Netflix now boasts 247 million paid subscribers worldwide in the third quarter.
One interesting reason behind this growth is Netflix's commitment to cracking down on password-sharing. They've rolled out their "paid sharing" program globally, and the results have been surprising. Rather than losing many members due to this initiative, Netflix found that a significant number of customers who used to share passwords have converted into full paying subscribers.
Furthermore, it's important to note that only Netflix's premium service provides 4K+HDR quality streaming for your smart TV, provided that your TV supports this feature. This means that lower-priced plans can stream content in 1080p resolution.
To understand a bit into the technical aspect, when encoding for live streaming, both hardware and software encoders employ various techniques like chroma subsampling, spatial image compression, and temporal motion compensation. These methods help reduce the bandwidth required for streaming to about 1/1000th of the original video's size.
Speaking of video resolution, 4K is a term you often hear, but some prefer to call it Ultra HD or UHD for brevity. This distinction arises from the fact that "4K" originally referred to a resolution used in digital cinemas, measuring 4,096 x 2,160 pixels. Most of the TVs and prosumer/consumer cameras described as "4K" actually have a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 pixels. In simple terms, 4K offers a video resolution that's four times more detailed than modern HD televisions, which typically have a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels.
So, for our local viewers in Palm Coast and Flagler County, these are the latest developments from Netflix, and it seems like the future of streaming is evolving in some interesting ways. Will you be paying the price increase or opting out?
