Streaming service automatically hikes price of subscription #CanadaFinance

Netflix has hiked the price of its monthly subscription – including for existing members.

The standard subscription will go up by £2, and will now cost £12.99. But all tiers of subscription are affected by their own price changes, including the one that requires viewers to watch ads before their films and TV shows.

Netflix said that it will use the extra money from the price hike to “continue to invest in programming and deliver more value for our members”.

“We will occasionally ask our members to pay a little more so that we can re-invest to further improve Netflix,” it said.

The cheapest standard subscription with ads will now cost £1 more, at £5.99, and the most expensive premium version will have its own £1 rise to £18.99.

It will also raise the cost of adding an extra member onto an account by £1, to £4.99. That is part of a crackdown by Netflix that targeted accounts that are shared across households, and led the company to offer the option to add other people for a smaller fee.

The changes come after similar price rises in the US, Canada, Portugal and Argentina, where prices went up by a similar amount.

Netflix announced those earlier price rises in the wake of its results from the end of the year, which showed an influx of new subscribers. It said that it ended 2024 with 300 million subscribers – up 41 million from 2023, and faster growth than its previous best year in 2020.

The latest rises led to a flurry of users announcing on social media that they would cancel their account. That can be done through the website, and Netflix offers a help page that includes directions to that page as well as answers to questions about what will happen when an account is cancelled.