Netflix removes its basic tier in the US and the UK

They started to enforce the multi home rule on my account, so I cancelled my subscription. I think I had the account over 10 years. I was barely using my account anymore, so I don't miss it that much.

Looks like they're trying the new twitter and reddit strategies. FOMO is real!

This is just going to push more people to piracy.

My number one criticism of Netflix was that it was too accessible so this is a welcome change, I really think the higher bar will increase the quality of views.

I recently cancelled all streaming services I had.

I now use Plex / Jellyfin with Plex_Debrid & RealDebrid.

• Total cost - $3.00 per month (RealDebrid)

Seems like all these companies are following the airlines model to becoming profitable. Make everything as miserable as possible for all your customers, and make them pay extra for a basic experience. Things that used to be included like meals or being able to sit with the rest of the people you are flying with are now exorbitantly expensive.

Everyone here seems to think this'll be another nail in their coffin. But I'm not sure. As far as I know, they're the only steaming platform that's actually profitable. Plus any current users of that plan are getting grandfathered in, so they're just removing the option for new people which I think is pretty normal for services to do.

Only they know how many people are on the 720p plan. And I'd bet they've run the numbers to know that they'll make more revenue from new users who sign up for the higher tier than the revenue lost from users no longer being able to select this plan.

Sounds like a bad idea..

I hate Netflix as much as you guys do and I think their content is dogshit, but you're naive if you think they're going under any time soon. Their revenue increased from the password sharing ban crap, and it's likely only like 1% of people used the 720p plan anyway. Netflix is ass but financially they're chillin.

They're forcing me away everytime they make a decision. I'll stick with paying for a plexshare, I know I can get it for free elsewhere, but I can't be arsed messing about if there's shit links.

I cancelled when they jacked up their prices and announced the ad-supported tier. They've been nothing but anti-consumer the last couple years and their product just isn't worth the price anymore.

Aye ye scallywags! T'night we sail the seven seas!

All of these internet corporations really thought they were institutions that could not be rattled. They forget that in the grand scheme of things they have been around for no time at all and consumers will be happy to move to whatever comes along next.

I paid the highest amount so my friend and her nuclear family could watch Netflix at the same time as my husband and I. They got shut out so I just cancelled. My friend bought a lower package so Netflix actually lost money. Not sure it is going to work out worth it for them overall.

For those looking for alternatives, I would only suggest Plex if you're OK with hitching your wagon to a different company with interests possibly competing with your own. Its great software and easy to set up but they can remove features you like and use at any time. It may be a risk worth taking for you but go into it with eyes open. I dropped them when they removed photo sync and started getting more aggressive about their content offerings.

Jellyfin is my current home and I like it a lot but I recognize that not everyone wants to deal with the setup and troubleshooting.

For some middle ground, there's also Emby which is a commercial version of Jellyfin.

I really need to build a media server

Netflix has been cooking this up for years now and other video platforms like Youtube are testing similar strategies already to follow suit. Prices are ramping up and quality of pretty much all services (web and others) is downspiraling rapidly. Guess that's what they call market self-regulation, heh? Anyway, as much as Netflix and others say this will make them a great deal of money, it will backfire soon or later. I think a lot of us will realise we're better off with less of these time wasters in our lives in the end.

Personally I got fed up of all their cancelling shows I was actually interested in. Moved to paramount plus to get star trek, then will probably cancel that for as bit. Just found myself watching crap on netflix, I can get crap from the free streamers like Roku and Pluto and 4od/itvx/my5 that get free in UK (with ads no subs)

I still have an active Netflix account (for the odd thing I haven't yet added to my self-hosted Jellyfin instance), and actually downgraded from the Premium tier to the Basic tier a few months ago when they started cracking down on password-sharing here in Canada.

Even though the Basic tier is "only 720p", I barely notice the difference in quality since my TV (and a lot of other modern TVs) has built-in upscaling that works surprisingly well. And I'm the type that is really picky about picture quality, particular about codecs and encoding methods, and all that jazz. But I'm really happy that I managed to get onto the Basic tier before they removed it. I was prepared for a clear drop in quality in return for cost-savings, and I was okay with that, but was delighted to find nothing had noticeably changed after switching over.

The Basic tier checks all of my boxes, verifiably:

• 1 screen at a time is enough
• The end result of the video quality I can perceive is perfect
• Cheapest plan without ads

Sometimes I even wonder if my TV is even actually upscaling from 720p, or if Netflix is just quietly serving 1080p in reality, but was just continuing to advertise 720p to deter people from the cheaper plan to get them onto a more expensive one, with plans all along to phase this tier out.

My parents, who were previously sharing my account when I was on the Premium tier, ended up getting their own account also on the Basic tier. The net result is that Netflix makes less money off of the two of our accounts combined now compared to the single Premium account we shared before. So in the end, they ended up losing money, and we lost nothing of perceivable value.

I'll probably end up cancelling our account at some point entirely, and my parents can continue to use their own account without being affected, so the forced split actually saved us all money and made our situations more future-proofed.

Contrary to popular belief, I actually think that the Basic tier could have ended up seeing more uptake in the long-run had people who only needed a single screen and wanted to save money, decided to try it, and notice that the picture quality was more than satisfactory enough, either due to the stream quality being better than advertised in reality, or due to the pretty good upscaling ability of modern TVs. I'm sure word would have gotten around from technically-minded people to the masses at some point, and we would have seen more people switching.

I'm sure Netflix did away with the Basic tier because they knew it could realistically put a dent in their profits at some point.

Permanently Deleted

Looks like the basic tier was already shrinking anyways as people were opting for the ads option more and more, so they decided to nix it anyways to make their own lives easier.

Makes sense, its 1 less "mode" to support and that is a big deal for QA testing.

Verizon just upped the price of my grandfathered plan I was on. They told me that on the phone. I just left, luckily that was an option.

It was inevitable after the response to Netflix's crackdown on account sharing and progressively higher prices.
That was a critical moment for the users to exercise their leverage against a new, worse direction in the value of streaming offerings, but the general user lacked the foresight to understand that.

Now that it's been proven that the general user will maintain their subscription even after such drastic changes in value, the trend of a loss of flexibility in tier options, the inclusion of ads in more, if not all, tier options; multi-month subscription requirements, and the complete loss of account sharing will all continue, not only in Netflix but accross all the streaming industry as a whole.