Netflix Offers Streaming-Only Plan, Increases Unlimited Plan Prices

Netflix has just announced a few changes to their subscription plans. First, they’re now offering a streaming-only plan for $7.99/month. This plan lets you watch unlimited TV episodes and movies via Netflix’s streaming service but doesn’t include any DVDs by mail. Second, they’re increasing the prices on their current unlimited plans, which offer both DVDs by mail and streaming.

Here is Netflix’s explanation for the changes:

Why the changes? Our selection of TV episodes and movies available to stream has grown dramatically, and as a result most members want us to deliver unlimited TV episodes and movies two ways: streaming instantly over the internet plus DVDs by mail. The price increase will allow us to continue to offer the popular plan choice of unlimited TV episodes and movies streaming instantly along with unlimited DVDs. The new plan, which does not include DVDs, is a great option for the increasing number of members who only want to watch instantly. The $7.99 a month price reflects no DVD shipping costs on this plan.

Netflix had previously launched a streaming-only plan in Canada back in September, and I think we can all agree that it was only a matter of time before the plan became available in America.

The streaming-only plan is very tempting, I must say. Nearly all of our household’s Netflixing — is that a verb yet? — is done via streaming; thanks to kids, we simply don’t have a lot of time to watch TV and movies these days, so we’ve really come to appreciate the convenience of Netflix’s streaming service. And while the selection of streaming titles is only a fraction of their DVD/Blu-ray library, we haven’t found it to be terribly limiting given our limited TV/movie time.