“It’s great that all these big swings worked very well in the quarter,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos (pictured, 2023) said Tuesday on a call with investors.
However, Sarandos did indicate that ongoing wildfires in southern California will not impede new releases or future revenue. File Photo By Allison Dinner/EPA-EFE
Jan. 22 (UPI) — The streaming service Netflix says it is raising prices again with plans to-reinvest back into programming, according to the company.
On Tuesday, Netflix announced that “we are adjusting prices today across most plans” in the United States, Canada, Portugal and Argentina.
A standard monthly subscription with ads will increase by one dollar to $7.99, and a regular monthly subscription without advertisements will jump to $17.99 from $15.49, according to Netflix. Its higher-priced premium tier will go up from $22.99 to $24.99 per month.
The price increases will go into effect during the next billing cycle for subscribers, Netflix spokesperson MoMo Zhou told The Verge.
Meanwhile, stock shares bounced 12% early Wednesday morning during early trading hours after Netflix unveiled its new plan.
Bank of America Global Research described the Netflix earnings report as “very strong” in a note shared with ABC News.
In a letter to investors, company officials wrote that as it invests in new programming, “we will occasionally ask our members to pay a little more so that we can re-invest to further improve Netflix.”
The global streaming platform is projecting nearly $44 billion in revenue for 2025 and a 29% operating margin up one point from its prior forecast, according to the letter.
Last year in October, Netflix said that revenue beat expectations coming in at $9.83 billion versus its projected $9.77 billion, and reported a $2.4 billion net income along with 5.1 million new subscribers.
But over the last quarter of 2024, Netflix added 19 million subscribers, bringing its total to more than 300 million customers, and revenue spiked 16% over the last three months of last year, hitting $10 billion for the first time in a single quarter.
It last raised subscription prices in October 2023 but ended its basic ad-free plan in United States and Britain a few months prior over that summer.
However, it marked the last time Netflix plans to reveal its number of quarterly subscribers after it said it only will announce “major subscriber milestones as we cross them” starting in the first quarter of this new year.
It arrived on top of an earnings report that showed its largest gain in subscribers over a three-month window since Netflix was founded in 1997 only to witness its shattering success a decade later.
The streaming company saw further success with its second Squid Games installment, and during its MMA event at the end of 2024 with boxing legend Mike Tyson and Jake Paul in Las Vegas that fueled a record $18.1 million just in gate revenue.
“It’s great that all these big swings worked very well in the quarter,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said Tuesday on a call with investors.
Sarandos said that ongoing wildfires in southern California will not impede new releases or future revenue.
“So, our goal is to keep everything on schedule safely, be mindful of folks who need time to work through the challenges of the fires, including, in some cases, loss of life and home,” he added. “But this industry has been through a really tough couple of years, starting with COVID, going into the strikes, and now this.”