I don’t understand why everyone is so up in arms over Netflix’s minor price increases…we pay far less than we would for cable, and we have MUCH more control over what we watch. Think about it: for about the same cost as purchasing a single DVD, you can get an unlimited number of DVDs mailed to your house, AND you can stream tens of thousands of movies, tv shows, and documentaries to the majority of the modern electronics you own. When you step back and look at what you’re getting, it’s a great deal.

Besides, I like supporting Netflix; they provide access to a lot of really hard-to-find stuff…sometimes, they’re the only legal way to obtain certain titles. Specifically, their collections of silent films, anime, foreign classics, and documentaries are second-to-none.

For you folks who weren’t members when Netflix first started to offer streaming services, compare the service now to how it used to be: you were limited to a certain number of “streaming hours”, they didn’t offer HD streaming, had only a couple thousand titles available, and offered no subtitles.

Now, their streaming options have exploded in number, they offer HD, they are working on adding subtitles to streaming content (which they are making slow but steady progress on), and are adding new titles every week. Their infrastructure costs must have skyrocketed in the past year or two…we own about 600 DVDs, and the cost of ripping them all to a RAID large enough to hold them is prohibitively expensive. I can’t even begin to fathom how much it costs to run the constantly expanding streaming service Netflix is offering, especially when you take licensing costs into consideration.

So yeah. Given the improvements they’ve made (and continue to make), I say a minor price increase is a valid thing for Netflix to do. Frankly, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.

EDIT: I know this won’t affect everyone, but Netflix certainly isn’t resting on its laurels. It looks like Netflix will be coming to the 3DS as early as tomorrow.