As we learned a little while ago, the DVD_by-mail-and-streaming giant Netflix, is raising their base rate for unlimited streaming+1 DVD from $9.99 to $15.98 per month. That's a huge jump in price point for a service that is nice, but still fairly sub par.
Between antagonizing Criterion into moving their streaming to Hulu+ (and the non-existence of new Criterion Bluray titles) and the utter junk quality of the StarzPlay part of the service (part of which was disabled earlier while they figured out some legal stuff), it seems to me that it might be time to pause and reconsider things.
Is it unreasonable for a company to up it's price to the consumer? No, surely not. The percentage of that price is another thing though.
As a multi-year former employee of Blockbuster, I can safely say that they're not the answer (and have quite possibly been run by Satan at one point), and neither is Red Box for people who want more choice than current mainstream titles.
Maybe it's not actually time to dump Netflix, and this is just the shock of such a steep price hike talking. They still offer streaming only for $7.99, but that doesn't interest me since I don't watch that much television, and they don't have the shows I would watch (West Wing, Seinfeld, etc) streaming. When I call it subpar, maybe I'm being too harsh, letting the Want it Now mentality take over somewhat unreasonably. Maybe I'm remembering the times I've said, "Fuck!" to myself when a movie I wanted to stream wasn't streaming in HD and not remembering the times of being surprised that movies were streaming in HD (like recent titles Love in the Afternoon and Mr. Baseball -- perfect companion pieces).
I'm not entirely sure, but the one thing that is for sure, though, is that it's time to take up Hulu+ on their seven day free trial.
