In May 2014, Netflix began to raise the price of its standard streaming plan for new subscribers, first to $8.99 a month, then to $9.99 a month starting in October. Existing subscribers, however, were grandfathered into the plan at $7.99 a month for the two-stream, “HD” quality plan.
But those days will soon be over.
Next month, all grandfathered customers will be moved up to $9.99 for the standard plan. Analysts at UBS have estimated that this change will affect about 37% of US subscribers, or 17 million people.
And most of those 17 million subscribers aren’t aware of the coming changes, according to research by JPMorgan. About 80 percent of those in a recent JPMorgan survey who will be “un-grandfathered” in May didn’t know the price hike was coming.
How will these subscribers react?
UBS estimates that roughly 3 percent to 4 percent of affected subscribers will cancel, though many more say they will (about 15 percent of those surveyed by JPMorgan).
Despite the price increase, Netflix still has a lead in “price per hour of entertainment” over pay TV. Netflix costs $0.09 per hour of viewing, while a typical pay-TV package costs $0.30 an hour, according to UBS.
Here is Netflix’s current pricing structure:
This article was originally published on Business Insider. Copyright 2016.