Los Gatos strikes again. Netflix is raising U.S. prices for the second time in a year, proving that when it comes to squeezing subscribers, the streaming giant has learned absolutely nothing from the backlash.
The company announced price increases across all tiers, continuing its strategy of making viewers pay more while simultaneously fragmenting their content library. It's the streaming equivalent of raising rent while also removing half the furniture.
This is the perfect encapsulation of streaming's current problem. Services keep raising prices while content gets more scattered. Remember when Netflix was supposed to replace cable? Now it costs about the same, except you need four other subscriptions to watch everything you want.
Netflix is banking on being too big to fail. And they might be right — the company still dominates streaming viewership. But there's a breaking point somewhere. Every price hike pushes more viewers toward subscription fatigue, or worse, back toward piracy.
The irony is delicious. Reed Hastings built Netflix by making it easier and cheaper than pirating. Now they're recreating the exact conditions that made piracy appealing in the first place. Congratulations, you've played yourself.
In Hollywood, nobody knows anything — except that viewers will eventually say enough. We just don't know when.





