Still reasonable but this was probably a strategy all along. They'll keep DVD rates low so it doesnt appear as if they are raising their rates. I never used netflix as BBO always was a better price. But i haven't needed to use either in a long time.

Yup, got that one too and cancelled blu-ray access. Big whoop...I'm deployed and just have the plan so my dad can watch DVDs at home. He has no blu-ray player. So...yeah. Frig it.

20%? To the point that the total increase represents about 20% of the total cost of your membership? Sure. But they are actually increasing it by quite a bit more than that. The fee for my 3-out plan for instance is increasing a whopping 400% (from $1 to $4) and therefore, I have canceled my blu-ray access.

Glad they're not raising the rates on the normal customers.

I had no idea that they even charged different rates for people renting Blu-ray. I do it whenever a BR version is available for a particular movie. I suppose it's worth it though.

Regular up-converted DVD's look nearly as good as Blu-ray DVD's. Up-converted DVD's have a sharper picture than what you see at the movies, IMO. Blu-ray is nice, but not worth the added cost.

Holy crap, that's a HUGE increase.

Oh well, guess I need to drop my plan a level or two to make up for it. I never watch 3 DVDs at a time anyway.

This kinda pisses me off, as I got the email as well, pushing my one at a time (unlimited) up to $10.99, the same time their service seems to have fallen off (at least in my area).

But as I have an HD Tivo, I get unlimited 'watch instantly' on my Tivo (and PC) so it's not cancellation time yet. But one of these days....

@Barney_The Plug_ Frank: To the non picky eye i guess. If you don't notice the diff between 1080 (even mkv) and 480 upconvert it's huge to me.

But then again i play my PC games @2500x1600.

@Barney_The Plug_ Frank:

Come on now, for newly released movies, Blu-ray blows the pants off of their 480 counterparts.

The range most people start noticing a difference between a Blu-Ray disc and an upscaled DVD is between four and five feet across. So, most people can (and should) forsake Blu-Ray.

@Randy Treibel:

How big's your television? I'm a filmmaker, I care a lot about this kind of thing, and quite frankly, even people far pickier than me can't tell the difference until you hit maybe four feet. You have to care, a lot, and frankly, you have to care more about the image itself than the damn movie.

Besides, Blu-Ray invites gross abuses on the part of both studios and filmmakers. Just look up what Fox did to "Patton", or what Billy Friedkin did to "The French Connection" (something I'm surprised didn't hit Consumerist); it's like we're fighting the battle to keep colorization from happening all over again!

yeah i just got this email. sucks. but not too bad. its only going up $2 for me so ill deal with it :)
love me my blu-rays haha.

@Dan Seitz:
OK, I'll bite...what did they do to Patton and the French Connection?

I might take Blu off my account. Gotta think about it and go look at my queue.

I removed Blu-Ray when I got this message. My hdtv is not large enough that I'm going to notice the lower resolution, and I never watch extras anyway.

Is it safe to assume that the increase is due to the increased cost of Blu-Rays?

Based on this, would it be safe to assume that costs would go down once Blu-ray costs go down?

I called Netflix Customer Service and voiced my opinion -- that the increase is excessive (I'm OK with a $1 increase, not $3) and that the timing is bad, with the economy and such (I was laid-off 10 days ago -- one of the 11% here in Oregon.

@jacques:

Apparently, they colorized them?

I keed, I keed.

Meh -- only another buck for me ($8.99 plan + $1 becomes $8.99 + $2). Totally worth it for being able to program my own movie channel in HD.

@Barney_The Plug_ Frank:

It's just amazing how people all of the sudden stopped accepting advances in technology. The good enough attitude is not needed. Hope you didn't buy one of those new plasma/lcd tvs. Isn't tube tv good enough.

I hope they plan on doing something about the long waits on some blu-ray titles. I wouldn't mind the increase if they used at least some of that money to buy more disks.

I got the email a little while ago and killed my blu-ray access quickly. I am on the 6 out at a time deal and I effectively burn thru my pile of disks every weekend. I was fine when it went up a buck, but when it goes up 6 extra bucks a month, no.

Of course, I predict that this change will turn off quite a few of their blu-ray customers.

Getting that email today actually convinced me to cancel my account. I normally don't keep discs longer than 3 days, but the last batch I got I've had for a few weeks. I'll just mail them back, and forget about it.

@Barney_The Plug_ Frank: When people say that it drives me crazy because you really have to have major vision issues to not notice the huge difference. I have an upconverting dvd player and blu-ray AND HD-DVD hooked up to the same tv.

The blu-ray looks 100x sharper, and far more colorful and bright. You can also see finer details. You try watching your amazing upsampled movie next to a true hd movie and there are tons of tiny details you would see in a blu-ray that the resolution and bitrate of dvd just do not allow.

You can go on your merry watching dvd's upsampled to 1080p but you're kidding yourself if you think they look anywhere near as good.

@jacques: I'm curious, too. I tried googling for it but all I found were generally favorable reviews.

@Barney_The Plug_ Frank: Also upconverted dvd's cannot possibly be sharper than the cinema.

A cinema picture is in HD as is. They tale the cinema source and downscale the image for dvd which means lowering the resolution which in turn dulls the picture clarity. You can recover data that just isnt there.

@Dan Seitz: Im curious to know what you're talking about.

Yes they can do funny things with old movies but any movie made in the last 15 years looks fine as is in HD. You dont have to care alot to notice a difference.

My girlfriend who cares zero percent about picture quality noticed the difference the first time we watched a movie in HD and that was from 10 feet away and she was laying on her side.

Am I special or what? Serious question. My 3-disc regular, non-blue-ray DVD unlimited plan is $15.99, not 16.99. I'm a member since July 2006. Was I grandfathered in at the lower price? I recall they had lowered the price, but I didn't know they had bumped it up for new customers (if that's the case with the 16.99 rate).

As for their service, I have no complaints.

Dear Electronics Manufacturers,
If the next generation of technology for watching or listening to music and movies is still on some type of physical media for some reason, please put it in a protective shell like a floppy disc.

Now I know you like the fact that discs scratch easily, because it forces us to buy it again, but seriously, unless you allow us to legally and easily back up all of our media that we purchased legally, we consumers don't like the easily scratched discs. I know when the initial designs were bandied about for DVD, it was in a nice floppy disc like shell, but that would've saved customers (especially those with small children who can't make it through a 10 minute mini-van ride without Finding Nemo playing on the back of Mommy's headrest) a lot of money in the long term, and increased cost per unit.

I am sure that Netflix has increased costs because of damaged discs, which they in turn pass the costs on to us in increased fees. It's good for your bottom line. However, 40 bucks for a crappy blu-ray disc is a lot of money. Especially when most movies released are complete garbage.

Thanks for listening, even though I know you really aren't,
SubCow

@suburbancowboy: FWIW, scratches on the playing side of CDs, DVDs, etc. can be pretty easily polished out. The plastic is about 1 mm thick so you're not likely to polish through it.

Now, scratches on the label side, those are a different matter. (This is why you should resist the temptation to set optical discs down upside/down on any kind of surface.)

I do not agree with the whole "Blu Ray costs more" argument. Sure it is true to a point, but I almost NEVER pay more than $20 for a brand new BLU release.
Now throw in the fact that Netflix is buying thousands of disks at a time, and I do not believe the new fee is needed. $1.00 fine. $4.00 more.....By by Blu.
I will just get them elsewhere.

PS.
Hey Redbox...... Looks like a good time for a BLUbox

@jacques: From a couple of reviewers on Netflix with regards to FC:

3 stars out of 5 - Stay away from the Blu-ray version of this classic! I was only 7 when this first came out, so I do not have any idea if the graininess was on purpose, but it is annoying to watch on a big screen. I would hope that the regular version is better. I am a huge fan of 60 and 70 era movies so I am not just looking for the quick fix SFX. There was an awful lot to like about this movie, and I can see why it won 5 Oscars (back when the Oscar's truly meant something, not like today's liberal popularity contest)! You definitely need to watch this on a Rainy/Snowy Sunday afternoon, it is a classic, and therefore is not a Saturday Night Blockbuster. Hackman was great as usual!

2 stars out of 5 - This is probably the third time I've seen this movie since the early 70's and its just not special especially on blu-ray. The film grain is so obvious and at times objectionable, I must think that the graininess was intentional by the cinematographer and director. i had hoped the movie was going to be better on blu-ray for the visuals but it seems worse! There isn't even a musical score to justify being on blu-ray. I always wondered why this is a "best picture". You have to put that down to "the times" when portraying heroes as villians was so new and unexpected. But the story can be confusing at times and pacing boring for the first hour. When the Frenchman tries to kill Popeye Doyle, the story becomes ludicrous. I suspect the truth is more entertaining than this movie. Two stars for old time's sake.

-

My guess from these reviews is that the picture is quite grainy in Blu-Ray.

oh.. my.. god... not $1!!!!!! Nevermind the fact that any of you that splurged for the blu-ray in the first place spent way too much money on that for what amounts to getting movies, most of which are new and most of which are complete crap, in "amazing" quality. No, it's the $1 we have to worry about.

@David Brodbeck: Found this while searching about the French Connection on dvdtalk.com. "Fox's new Blu-ray of The French Connection is already raising a controversy on the web, for William Friedkin's personally supervised transfer. The original movie had a purposely ugly look; release prints were slimy, grainy and colorless. (I can see the Fox people in 1971 approving any mess that came from Deluxe as ready for the screen: "Looks terrible! Good Work! Ship it!") The previous DVD release worked digital magic to bring out all the color and detail in Owen Roizman's cinematography, reducing the grain and boosting the colors to the point where some of the mid-winter scenes looked downright cheerful.

In a new HD featurette, , Friedkin demonstrates his revisionist rationale. He wanted to mute the colors and retain a lot more grain, yet not lose the sharpness of Roizman's images. To that end he had his colorist create an element that oversaturated and de-focused the color. This smeary color image was very lightly superimposed over a B&W rendering of the film, resulting in a sharp, grainy movie with pastel colors. Because the colors are de-focused, they don't stay strictly "within the lines" of objects. Gene Hackman is as sharp as a tack, but his red Santa Claus suit bleeds softly all around him. Blacks clog up at night with almost a hi-con look. New York appears cold and inhospitable. It's an interesting effect that indeed achieves Friedkin's stated goal of creating a degraded color image. And he makes no bones about stating that it'll stay that way because that's the way he likes it!"

@nybiker: Could be incompetent mastering. MPEG compression tends to exaggerate random noise (such as film grain) because the compression artifacts make the noise spots bigger. The best solution is to run a noise filter on the video source before compressing, but that loses some sharpness. Given that a hyper-sharp picture is what Blu-Ray buyers are paying for, they may have decided to skip that step.

It's also possible people are just plain sitting too close to the screen, so the apparent size of the image (and hence the graininess) is a lot more obvious than it would be in the theater.

@Dacker: I emailed the CEO (reed.hastings@netflix.com) but decided not to call. I am sure they had nothing helpful to say am I right?

i don't have netflix, but have a couple questions.

1. do the streamed movies stream in some sort of higher quality?

2. if they don't, do you think that high definition streaming will be available for the people who opt to have the higher tier?

@parad0x360: Totally agree. We have the same set-up, and the difference is considerable.

@David Brodbeck: I have removed many a scratch from a CD, in addition to having an old Denon Dual 20-bit CD player which was built like a tank, and could play almost anything I threw in it.

That still doesn't negate the fact that all of the scratching would be prevented if the discs weren't naked and exposed the way they are.

@suburbancowboy:
Actually the only disks I have gotten from them that were bad were BD, one wouldn't play at all and the other just needed a little coaxing.
The Dark Knight with the cracked center came to me like that btw, but it still played.

I think the increase is different depending on when you joined and activated Blu-ray. The difference for us was a jump from $23.99/month to $28.99/month, and we couldn't justify that.

Instead of dropping Blu-ray, which we still want, we dropped down to the 3-at-a-time plan from the 4-at-a-time plan. We're also looking at other movie rental options, as Netflix just isn't competitive price-wise anymore.

It strikes me as odd, since DVDs were likely the same price as Blu-Ray discs were when Netflix debuted, and yet we didn't see a price *decrease* as that price declined.

@trujunglist: It is a lot more than just $1.00 they did that last year, and I was fine with that. Now my monthly fee is jumping up an extra $6 every month if I keep Blu-Ray access. Considering that at most I get maybe 2-3 Blu-Ray disks a month that is just unpalatable.

i was torn on doing it for 1$.

no way im paying 3$ a month for blu.

@suburbancowboy: Audio CDs were the worst and they have learned a lot since then. DVD's are actually quite a bit more robust than CD's in terms of scratch resistance and error correction. I haven't seen BD tech, but I would presume that they are at least as damage resilient as DVD. It's pretty neat tech with two or three type of error detection and correction codes.

@icruise: becasue blu-ray cost more than standard dvds...

@Terry Pasley: They've started: [www.redbox.com]

A few months ago when they raised the blu-ray price by $1 I lived with it. Now another $2 increase is just a ripoff. I can afford it, $3 is not a big deal but I dont rent enough blu-rays for this to be worth it.

Im voting with my wallet and taking my $3 a month back. Thanks Netflix.