Got an email from Netflix last night saying they were raising the cost of my Ultra HD streaming from $19.99/month to $22.99/month. This was to be, at least, the second price hike this year. There may have actually done a third but I'm not going to say they did without being sure. Ya, I could have dropped down to just HD streaming but I have a 55 inch LG set with HDR. Why would I not want to have the higher format?

Considering that I have Amazon Prime, Paramount Plus, HBO Max and Peacock Netflix needs me more than I need them and I bluntly told them so when doing the little cancellation survey thing.

I've been procrastinating on this for ages but it makes me one step closer to dropping Spectrum cable and going to just streams using Century Link for Internet and phone. One of the reasons I haven't already done this is the local channels access. Another is that Century Link would be DSL. Way back when I was in Florida I had AT&T DSL and it pretty much was a total pain but that was like 20 years ago and I'm sure the system has improved. I would lose some download speed going from my current 100Mb/sec to around 60Mb/sec but that is trivial as there is not any streaming that I know of that won't work just fine with a connection of 30Mb/sec.

Sigh, as to Spectrum... I have Internet, phone and video through them and they also keep raising the rates. My November bill was $247.48 and I have no 'premium' channels, just an add-on for the NFL channel and NFL Red Zone. Heck that monthly Spectrum bill is a lot more than I pay for 6 months of car insurance.

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Cable is entirely too expensive these days. We have Comcast here is VA and had Optimum when we were in NJ. Comcast is actually cheaper for me than Optimum and with faster Internet and more channels. I'm generally not the TV watcher, though - that's my wife. We have the top tier channel selection and no premium channels. My monthly bill for cable, phone and 1 gig Internet is about $250 (which includes 2 cable boxes). I also subscribe to Paramount Plus ad free with Showtime now -- I got that to watch the Star Trek series and my wife watches some content on it via the Comcast Xfinity cable box apps. I subscribe to Hulu (with ads) and AMC+ (no ads) for specific series that my wife watches on them. I pay annually for Hulu, AMC+, and Paramount Plus. Everything ends up just under $300 per month.
When we were with Optimum, cable, phone and 400 Mbps Internet was over $300 per month!

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stephen boots
Microsoft MVP 2004 - 2020
"Life's always an adventure with computers!"

That's one of the things I like about my web hosting, Steve. I have been with them since 2010 and have never had a price increase. This is probably largely due to living up to their name, Green Geeks. They actually are green being powered by their own windmill farms. Actually they usually sell power to the grid.

The 'Geeks' side of their name comes from their expertise. My photo gallery and these forums require a much older version of PHP on the server than what is current while another web app I run requires a newer version. When this issue came up I contacted them and within 2 hours they had modified the '.htaccess' for each site to allow different versions of PHP to run for each specific site. I just asked if there was something that I could do to resolve the issue but they just went ahead and fixed it all for me and then emailed me with detailed instructions as how to do it if needed in the future. Can't get better support than that. They are not cheap compared to other outfits out there costing me ~$75.00 quarterly but you tend to get what you pay for. Still I consider the price decent as it includes unlimited email accounts, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited data bases and unlimited storage. The unlimited storage is no joke as, largely due to my photo gallery, I'm using almost 15GB of their server space. They also do a redundant backup of everything I have up to two different backup servers daily. They are also the only hosting that I know of that has never been successfully hacked. I think the lack of hacking is largely due to a gimmick they came up with concerning data bases. Their data base servers are firewalled to where there is no external access. A data base can only be accessed from a query from within the associated domain. Oh, I would also know if anyone managed to log into my hosting account as every log in is is emailed to me as an added security measure.

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Your web host is certainly excellent. I think that $75 per quarter is well worth it for the service and stability.

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stephen boots
Microsoft MVP 2004 - 2020
"Life's always an adventure with computers!"

I used to feel the same as you Jay regarding UHD/HDR/4K on Netflix but i really can't see that much of a difference between HD and UHD these days on Netflix that justifies the extra expense of UHD, or any where else for that matter, yes it was good but it didn't really justify the extra money that HD over SD gave so i decided to save the money and drop back down to HD.
One of the good things about online streaming companies is you're not usually tied into a contract so you can play about with the package to see which works best for you... for me, HD on Netflix is now more than acceptable on my Samsung 55" 4K TV where as a few years ago it wasn't so great, presumably because since then the codecs have changed in leaps and bounds meaning Netflix et al have been able to increase the picture/sound quality without any additional overheads?

As an aside, a real bug bear of mine was the online push for Dolby Digital (in as many channels as possible) on Set Top Boxes, my satelitte TV provider made a change to their STB (Sky UK) about 2 years ago and it royaly screwed the default sound settings from my TV... i gave up trying to sort out the issue with Samsung and Sky because all they did was blame each other meaning i was going around in circles. (i.e I don't own nor want a surround sound system, i tried one once but because i live in an apartment it was far too loud and only caused complaints from my neighbours).

As another final aside; i've long thought that while some people who think the end of TV as we know it will result in a better experience were being narrow minded... they never really thought that through, in that people are now beginning to realise what that reality actualy is... channels like Disney/Discovery/Paramount etc spinning off into their own subscription channels only means more expense and less availability for the consumer... one that the likes of Netflix are slowly beginning to see as their subscriber numbers drop off a cliff.