No love, Virgin Mobile...

[senoritafish]

Wow, a 40% price increase between months for your 300min beyond talk?! Thanks a lot Virgin Mobile, at least Netflix sent me a warning first before they asked me to bend over. It's now only $5 less than the 1200 min one (used to be), which I only used 130 minutes of last month, so I thought I'd try save few bucks this month. No love. You're still cheaper than everyone else so I can't afford to go elsewhere, but that was a very rude shock when I went to top up this morning. Which now is going to have to wait until I get paid - because I think getting bread and milk instead so my kids can have breakfast this week is probably more important for this last week of the month.

It's quite interesting that it still says $25 for the lowest beyond talk plan on this page for submitting reviews. Updating the whole site would polite, don't you think?

Getting a little tired of the "We're still the best deal around even though we now suddenly cost about half again as much!" routine from some businesses lately. Not quitting Netflix either, but they'll be getting $2 less a month from me.

Edit: submitted as a review to their website (less the bending over part). They rejected it and suggested I review the guidelines which said: 1) not to mention retail partners phone prices; 2)or mention competitors. Since I didn't mention Target's/Walmart's phone prices, I didn't realize DVD rentals were a competitor of cell phones.

Comments

[otana.livejournal.com]

I don't get the Netflix hate, I really don't. They've been undercharging for a long time now, and while they're expanding servers, making a lot of new contracts, bringing in subtitled anime as well as dubbed (which needed negotiations), adding hard of hearing subtitles on their ever-growing instant queue ...

Man, I am glad they're raising their prices. Now it's more likely they'll have the money to improve their servers and ensure the service doesn't crash and burn. $15 a month seems totally reasonable to me, we watch about eight or so movies a month from them (and that's not counting the DVDs they send) and it's a lot cheaper than a movie ticket. We'll be getting rid of the DVD thing only because we barely use it and we could do with saving the money, but I guess I really don't understand the outcry I'm seeing from people.

[senoritafish.livejournal.com]

As I understand it, a lot of the increase is coming from Hollywood wanting more licensing fees, . I suppose the increase is understandable and they're still less than most other services - or combined services to get the same thing - but I don't know of anything where you suddenly increase the price by more than half and people aren't going to make a stink. If they'd done it incremently, there would have been a lot less of a fuss.

I like getting DVDs - I like all the extras on them which aren't included in the streaming. However, we go through them really slowly, so that part of the service really not worth keeping at this point. If I really want to see those things, I'll just set aside and buy it. So, we're doing the same as you.

Subtitles would be good, but since we purchased a Roku, one of the channels available is Crunchyroll, which is free at least for now. I did read something recently where the Netflix CEO was saying that if people expected their entire library to be streaming, that wasn't realistic and wasn't ever going happen. I find it frustrating that I'll start watching a series and suddenly it goes out of rotation and isn't available anymore.

You're right, it is way cheaper than a movie ticket, but that's something we seldom do anyway; I don't think we've gone to a full price movie since before the kids were born. It just comes on top of price increases with everything else too. It stings, especially since we no longer have my dad's share of the utilities.

/still me

[magnetbender.livejournal.com]

That I can understand; paying more for something suddenly is pretty shitty no matter what it is. I guess I just found it easier because I had been half expecting it. And realistically, they CAN'T have their entire library streaming without charging a lot more for fees, just imagine the bandwidth and server strain.

Re: /still me

[senoritafish.livejournal.com]

still otana? RP journal I take it?

Really, Netflix is the lesser of two evils. The phone went up $10 a month (an increase of $120/yr, vs Netflix's $72/yr). If I were a smart person, I really should just quit the both of them and put the money in a savings account, since we don't have one. For the phone, I could just switch to minutes used only, since I don't talk much, but it was really nice to be able to check LJ anywhere I was. I would just do without one, but John gets paranoid if he can't get ahold of me. *sigh*