Popular video rental firm Netflix has been a popular service among folks who’ve shelled out not only for high definition televisions but also for still-pricey Blu-ray disc players, since subscribers have been able to add Blu-ray discs to their rental queues just as if they were standard definition DVDs. Well, no more: Netflix has announced it will now begin charging $1 more per month for access to renting Blu-ray movies.
To justify the increase, Netflix cites the price of Blu-ray movies compared to standard DVDs. The rate change will go into effect November 5th; if users don’t want to pay the extra $1 per month, they need to manually remove Blu-ray access from their Netflix accounts.
Although Netflix currently offers more than 800 Blu-ray titles, the Blu-ray disc rental business hasn’t really taken off—for Netflix or its competition like Blockbuster—and Netflix CEO BArry McCarthy has recently indicated only a small fraction of the services’ subscribers rent Blu-ray discs.
Partly, low consumer interest in Blu-ray results from the aftermath of the format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD. Although Blu-ray won, many consumers discovered in the interim they were pretty happy with standard (and upscaled) DVD movies. Also, the prices of Blu-ray players (and Blu-ray movies) haven’t decline much since the end of the format war, staving off the swarms of consumers predicted to embrace the format after HD DVD’s demise. (The recent economic downturn has also made many consumers put pricey electronics purchases on the back burner.) Still others turned to online services for HD content, bypassing Blu-ray entirely.
