Netflix price rise: subscription cost hiked for users in the US, Canada and Latin America

Company has said in the past that it will use the money from price rises to make more original content

Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings (R) shakes hands with Japanese comedian Ryota Yamasato (L) during a photo session in the kick-off event of the Netflix business in Japan at a Softbank shop in Tokyo on September 2, 2015 (TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP/Getty Images)

Netflix is to up the price of its most popular plan, adding an extra dollar to the price for people in the US, Canada and some of Latin America.

The move follows a similar price increase in Europe and the UK earlier in the year. The company has previously said that it is planning price increases as a way of funding more original content.

The basic subscription has been increased by $1 per month to $9.99.

Existing customers will be given a “grace period” of varying time before they move to the new price. Netflix tends to allow those short periods of the old price, apparently as a way of keeping customers happy.

Only the middle plan, which lets people watch two streams at once in HD, is affected by the price change. Those that allow for one or four people to stream are unaffected.

Netflix boss Reed Hastings announced in July that price rises were on their way. He indicated then that the extra money would go towards funding new original content — an area that Netflix is looking to expand, with its first feature-length films coming later this year.

At the same time, Mr Hastings indicated that the site might eventually make it harder for people to share passwords to the same account. At the moment, users can share up to four profiles that effectively work as individual accounts — though there’s no indication that’s on the way, given the changes were made to the membership that specifically allows people to stream two things at once.

The US price change reflects a similar one Europe and the UK in August. Then, the price of the Basic HD subscription went up from £6.99 to £7.49, but only for new customers — as in the US, the prices for the top and bottom subscription plans didn’t change.

That price hike followed one in 2014, which was the first since 2011.