Is Netflix Still Worth It?

Six dollars. This is what had the internet boiling yesterday. Six dollars a month, or just less than 20 cents a day. As someone in my Twitter stream raged: "Here's a quarter...now shut up."

But for the thousands of Netflix subscribers upset about the decision by the content-streaming-and-DVD-mailing company to raise rates, no one has that many quarters. A reporter for the Greeley, Colorado Tribune tweeted, "I don't know how the person who wrote that Netflix press release gets to keep his or her soul." A Midwestern theatre professor tweeted, "Netflix from awesome and hip to evil and draconian in one day. Congrats, you just lost the Internet."

How evil and soulless is the move? Not very, say some who agree with the writer of the Netflix release (for the record, it was Jessie Becker, vice president of marketing, who executed that feat of positive-speak) that it's not exactly a price increase, depending on how you use Netflix. Those who currently pay $9.99 a month for unlimited streaming plus "unlimited" DVDs (though you can only have one out at a time, so your DVD consumption is limited by the realities of the U.S. Postal Service) can now choose between $7.99 a month for streaming only, or $7.99 a month for DVDs only.

This, says Becker, is a way of "offering our lowest prices ever" in order to "provide great value to our current and future DVDs-by-mail members." Up until Tuesday, there was no DVD-only option.