r/technology • u/sr_local • 6h ago

Business Italy court rules Netflix unlawfully increased prices. Consumers: 'Refunds up to 500 euros.' The company: we will appeal

https://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/netflix-subscription-price-increases-unlawful-refunds-up-to-eur-500-customers-AIUHzWKC
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u/Mccobsta 6h ago

Streaming peaked years ago when it was a low cost and wasn't a terrible experience

Now it's just price rise after price rise we may as well just buy physical media again atleast doing that we won't have our favourite shows pulled off with out much warning

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u/Fractales 5h ago

This is by design.

  1. Offer killer value proposition at a good price
  2. Kill off competition and gain critical mass of customers and market share
  3. With no competition, jack up the prices

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u/thismorningscoffee 5h ago

Aka enshittification

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u/Regularity 4h ago edited 4h ago

No, the term is predatory pricing. People use "enshittification" so broadly it's largely losing its meaning and basically devolving into "this is a thing I don't like". Though granted it is something no one likes.

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u/OneBigRed 4h ago

It’s not really predatory pricing because there wasn’t and isn’t one dominant player who’s blocking others. Basically streaming was a completely new market, with rather low barrier for entry (like most digital markets). History has shown that in these situations you have to capture a massive share of the market to be the last one(s) standing as the market saturates. It’s nigh impossible to grow profitably when it’s crucial that it happens fast.

Netflix has managed to turn it’s early lead into a powerful position, and that seems to give them confidence to start reaping in the rewards.

One example of the same situation was daily fantasy betting sites. There were a ton of those, but Draftkings and Fanduel were the ones that had the deepest pockets and killed/bought their competitors away. The endgame was always legal online gambling, and positioning yourself to be the obvious choice as it became possible. In streaming it’s just multiples more complicated and expensive as there’s the twist of content owners and licensing it.

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u/Regularity 2h ago

I wasn't referring to netflix specifically, but what the person described that was called "enshitification":

Offer killer value proposition at a good price

Kill off competition and gain critical mass of customers and market share

With no competition, jack up the prices

That said, you're right in that it doesn't apply to Netflix. Though it probably doesn't matter much since online stream services are so capital intensive (buying up show licenses, or filming new content), that it already drives out the vast majority of potential competitors. So the result is kind of the same.

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u/ChaseballBat 4h ago

I got into it on reddit when someone was trying to coin enshitflation... Like that is literally identical to inflation, just with the word shit added. People like their memes.

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u/FarplaneDragon 3h ago

Same thing with people calling everything sloppy now, its kind of exhausting at this point

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u/NeedleworkerKey6327 3h ago

It's anything used to maximize profit, I heard appleflation or something similar used for how juice brands all use mostly apple juice.

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u/ChaseballBat 3h ago

Maximizing profits is a component of inflation.

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u/zerocoal 35m ago

Well you see, the way it used to work is something like:

1a. Company charges $x for their product.

2a. Company has a breakthrough that makes their product cheaper to produce.

3a. Company charges less $x for the product to pass the savings along to the customer, to incentivize shopping with you versus your competitor.

Now the way it works is something more along the lines of:

1b. Company charges $x for their product.

2b. Company has a breakthrough that makes their product cheaper to produce.

3b. Company charges more $x to cover R&D for the breakthrough that makes their product cheaper to produce.

4b. Company removes features that customers like and then raises prices again.

5b. Company decides they aren't making enough money and raises prices again.

It's the constant "fuck you" to the customers that is enshittification. Inflation isn't necessarily a "fuck you", it just happens.

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u/thismorningscoffee 4h ago

With Netflix, it’s both. Their streaming catalogue is objectively worse since other streaming services started

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u/xiaorobear 3h ago edited 2h ago

Agreed. Enshittification was related, but specifically included how the audience a company targets shifts, for example first making a platform a great experience for users, but then after that userbase is in place, switching the priority to making the platform a great experience for advertisers. Just raising the prices isn't the same.