My opinion is a bit different. I have the one out at a time plus streaming and BluRay. I did only one because I have Blockbuster 2 out at a time plus games pass and it is ~$35 per month, I added Netflix a year ago when I dropped HBO and all other movie channels from DishNetwork. It's been a good deal for me. Got rid of $35 with limited content and replaced with $12.99 with more content than I can ever watch at my fingertips. The only reason I added BluRay option was because I saw about 3-4 titles per month that Blockbuster doesnt have in BluRay. Also, I never have any childrens titles and the streaming is loaded with them so when my grandson comes over, I'm all set. But that's just one TV, the home theater. Netflix for the same money allows me to stream to all my mobile devices. We have it on two ipads my PDA 2 computers, PS3, XBOX 360, Blu Ray player and my Vizio panel display. The quality is superior to Blockbuster but not as good as Vudu. Bottom line- Good enough for the money.
I also am a trading stock holder as I buy and sell depending on it's weekly swings. Consequently I also have a business attitude to what they are doing with this price increase. When the stock recently hit over $304 a share, I sold off all but 10 shares and made a nice profit since I bought the other 90 at $245 I had expected to hold but decided to take those profits last week and not be greedy. Then this price increase comes along and it just made me smile because I knew most consumers would be mad as hell and make all sorts of noise about cancelling which will cause the sellers to bail. That is exactly what they did today and considering the outlook for Netflix is quite bright I'm presently buying back in as it continues to stay well below my cash out price from last week. I don't expect this to affect medium growth of the company at all. In fact, it has been known for quite some time that the Netflix profit margin of the mailorder DVD business is quite low compared to the streaming business. Got news for you in case you don't understand- Netflix wants customers to dump that mail order business and keep the streaming business. They plan to continue to expand the streaming library and accounts by a huge multile in the coming year. Management hopes all of you cancel the DVD accounts as it will raise their net profits. In the coming year Netflix plans to expand streaming into 43 additional countries, including China! Whether or not the streaming rates will increase has to do with the greed of the media providers. Netflix future plan is to improve bottom line by killing the DVD subscribers and expand the streaming business world wide. So, when all you DVD subscription cancellers execute, you are actually doing exactly what Netflix wants you to do.
You might wonder why they just don't cancel that end of the business rather than raise rates. It's just good business, They figured out what the profitability needs to be to maintain the DVD mail order business and priced it accordingly. So, they are saying if you really insist on having mail order DVD rentals you'll need to pay the price.
Personally, this is one price increase I was very happy and excited to see come. I will cancel my yawner of a bluray one out at a time, be happy with my blockbuster movie/game pass and continue with the bargain in streaming from Netflix.