Technology

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.

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.