Newsletter
It’s a brand new year, which means a Netflix price hike is on the horizon. It seems that every year, Netflix is raising prices again, and the company basically confirmed that another one is coming in its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday.
In the company’s letter to shareholders, Netflix mentioned, “As we invest in and improve Netflix, we’ll occasionally ask our members to pay a little extra to reflect those improvements, which in turn helps drive the positive flywheel of additional investment to further improve and grow our service.”
Previously, Netflix had said that it would not raise prices again until at least the middle of 2024. But Netflix could feel like it has the momentum to raise prices again, as Netflix added nearly three million subscribers in the US and Canada at the end of 2023. It now sits at just over 260 million subscribers.
Netflix just spent $5 billion on WWE’s Monday Night Raw
Earlier on Tuesday, Netflix and the WWE announced that it reached a deal to carry Monday Night Raw on the platform. The deal is valued at $5 billion over 10 years, so that’s about $500 million per year for a single 3-hour TV show, which is pretty incredible for WWE. However, someone needs to pay for that, and that’s always going to fall on the customer.
So after this news broke, many speculated that Netflix’s prices were about to go up again, and here we are. Netflix has spent a lot of money on original content, only to cancel much of it after a season. But this deal with the WWE is a pretty incredible one. Outside of the US, it will carry all of the Premium Live Events like the Royal Rumble this Saturday and Wrestlemania, as well as the entire library of WWE content. In the US, that will all still be on Peacock until at least March of 2026. And a few other countries where WWE has deals with other partners – like Sony in India.
Actually, this is a big win for both Netflix and the WWE. Moving from the USA Network, where it has been for a good number of years, to a streaming platform like Netflix allows the WWE to have a larger audience. Around 100 million households have Netflix in the US, and the USA Network is available in about half of those, especially as cord-cutting really takes over. The WWE is already huge, but this deal is going to allow them to grow even more. For Netflix, this is the start of live sports, something the company has wanted to dabble into for quite some time but lost out on NBA rights, as well as NFL Sunday Ticket.
Netflix plans to eliminate the ‘Basic’ plan
As if that wasn’t enough Netflix news, the company also announced today that it is eliminating its “Basic” plan, which currently costs $11.99. It’s basically the ads plan but ad-free. So instead, Netflix will be dropping to three plans, which include the “Basic with Ads” for $6.99 per month, with Standard at $15.49 per month, and Premium at $22.99 per month.
It’s worth noting that Netflix stopped letting new subscribers sign up for the Basic plan in Canada last year. So the writing was already on the wall.
The plan will be phased out for new and rejoining members. So, if you are currently on this plan, you should be able to keep it, at least for now. Netflix notes that about 40% of all Netflix sign-ups are for the ads plan.