Yah this sucks. The streaming is absolutely pathetic -- I don't understand how Netflix thinks it's okay to charge the same as the DVD plan when there are WAY more DVDs to watch. I go through ~20 dvds a month, so the DVD plan is what I'm sticking with.
I would totally pay a 60% price hike... if it was because of a 60% product quality increase. Netflix cannot possibly think it's smart to make people pay so much more for the same, mediocre product. It was okay before cause it was kind of like getting streaming for free, as for me, 10 bucks seemed like a decent price for the DVD plan itself. Streaming sucks horribly, so this made sense. The new price hike? No sense. It's like Netflix forgot that the tried and true bundling business plan works wonderfully.
I feel like Netflix is confused, too. It's like they thought people wanted streaming only, so they made a streaming only plan. This wasn't as popular as they expected, so they decided that people must want either the DVDs or streaming, and not just streaming, so they split the plan up to save people money. What they didn't realize was that streaming only didn't take off as well as they planned not because people just weren't in to streaming, but because their streaming options SUCK! It's not worth the money for most people. If their entire DVD catalog was available to stream, I bet a good 75% or more of customers would stream only, myself included.
Right now all I have to watch is 3 TV series I'm interested in, and semi-blockbuster movies that are either old or didn't do as well as planned in theaters. For example, Iron Man is not streaming. It was from 2008 but was ridiculously popular. No stream. Iron Man 2, on the other hand, wasn't as popular, yet is more recent. But, it's streaming. 8 out of the Top 100 on Netflix are streaming. That's just sad. Netflix, this business plan WILL NOT WORK.