From the Editor’s Desk: Inconvenient ⭐️

In April, Netflix, a service that forces me to constantly reaffirm that I am not just me but in my real home, emailed me. Not to apologize for this ongoing inconvenience, but rather to inform me that it was changing the pricing on my Premium subscription. And yes, that was the term it used, changing. As if maybe the price were going down.

It was not. As we reported back in March, Netflix has raised the prices of its various subscription tiers for the second time in just over a year. Netflix Premium used to cost $24.99 per month, but now it's $26.99. So not a big price hike, but this ignores how Netflix is more aggressively going after multi-person households so it can charge an additional $7.99 (with ads) or $9.99 per additional member, something I'm supposed to do because my two kids live elsewhere. I don't do that, but if I did, I'd be on the hook for about $45 per month so we can all watch Netflix.

I am not doing that. Ever.

It's a classic tale. Subscription services like Netflix are great deals until they are not thanks to regular price hikes, an expanded set of competitors that's grown so vast no one can keep them all straight, and the resulting diffusion of high quality content. I do feel that Netflix is still the "best" of this type of service, meaning it has the biggest and broadest collection of content. But there are terrific shows and other content that I want to see that are spread across all those other services, too. Like "butter scraped across too much bread," as Bilbo Baggins so vividly describes in The Lord of the Rings.

We don't have a live TV solution of any kind, which probably saves us almost $100 a month but also incurs the occasional problem, like on New Year's Eve when all the people in our home want to watch the event live on TV. We watch live sporting events here in Mexico–like the last few Super Bowls, World Series, and NBA Finals–at a local bar we frequent, and that's worked out well. And thank God for that because my growing concerns about the proliferation and costs of subscription services would be dramatically more problematic if I had to pay for live TV.

It's not just Netflix and all the other video-on-demand services. It's Spotify and all the music streaming services. It's OneDrive and all the cloud storage services. It's my Audible Premium Plus membership. Amazon Prime. Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Apple One, Microsoft 365 Family, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and Google One/Google AI Pro. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. And probably more I am forgetting right now because, let's be clear about this, that's a big part of the business plan for subscription services. The best customers are the ones who pay for a service they never use. And I am an excellent customer.

Complaining about subscription services is pointless and obvious. We all get it. We all know what we could do about this problem, and most of us do nothing at all. We can cart out the term...