According to a story posted at Ars Technica, customers of Blockbuster’s ‘Total Access’ program, it’s competitor to Netflix, received an email yesterday announcing a price hike for the service.
The biggest change seems to have come to members of their Total Access Premium plan where the monthly rates are jumping from $24.99 to $34.99. Also of note is that this program has been removed from the Total Access signup page so I assume it is no longer an option for new subscribers.
Other plans are receiving a rate increase as well, just not as drastically.
The story points out, “Total Access was created as a response to Netflix, and Blockbuster aggressively pursued Netflix customers by pricing its plans competitively and offering what Netflix can’t: in-store rentals. The payoff—in terms of raw subscriber numbers—was good. By last spring, Blockbuster had managed to make up significant ground on its rival. But the strategy was arguably a financial disaster, with mail-order growth cannibalizing in-store traffic.”
Total Access was an interesting alternative to Netflix because it allowed you to drop by a Blockbuster store in person to return a movie you’d rented using the Total Access program and exchange it for another for free, but with the rate hike and the difficulty in actually finding a Blockbuster store near me (thanks to store closures) that hasn’t closed I’m not so sure anymore.
[Via Ars Technica]
Filed under: entertainment, tech
