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Apparently Amazon’s not the only company in the mood for price hikes. Just days after the price of an Amazon Prime membership in the US jumped from $79 per year to $99, online video service Netflix announced plans to increase its monthly subscriber fee.
Netflix mentioned the price hike in the company’s latest shareholder report.
The company already increased the price of a subscription for new subscribers in Ireland from €6.99 to €7.99 in January, while grandfathering existing customers for 2 years. Now the company plans to raise rates in other markets by $1 to $2 depending on the country while allowing existing subscribers to keep paying the current rate “for a generous period of time.”
Here’s a roundup of tech news from around the web.
- Netflix plans to raise streaming video prices for new subscriber by $1 – $2 per month
Other tidbits from the shareholder report include a promise to support voice search on the Amazon Fire TV later this year, and soon cable subscribers with TiVo boxes might be able to use Netflix from the same box. Plans to support non-TiVo boxes are also in the works… but that’s further down the road at this point. [Netflix] - Google Hangouts 2.1 for Android combines SMS/Hangout chats into single conversation view
Now if you regularly send SMS and chat messages to the same contact, you won’t have to worry about finding the right conversation to continue. Other updates include a simplified contacts list, improved video call quality, and a home screen widget for recent conversations. . [Google+] - BLU Studio 6.0 HD is a $250, 6-inch budget smartphone
There’s no shortage of low-end and mid-range smartphones on the market, but BLU has a reputation for offering decent (for the price) models in the US. This one has a 720p display, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of storage (plus a microSD card slot) and a 1.3 GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6582 processor. [Android Police] - Firefox Australis user interface becomes the default with FF 29. Here’s a look at future changes that could be coming
Mozilla rolled out a major new user interface for Firefox starting with version 29 beta. In a few weeks the beta will become stable… giving millions of Firefox users a brand new UI (which looks an awful lot like Google Chrome). But the changes are just starting. Here’s a look at some future changes that could be on the way. [gHacks] - Nokia expects sale to Microsoft to close April 25th
A little over half a year after Microsoft announced plans to acquire smartphone maker Nokia, it looks like the deal is about to close this week. Does this mean Nokia won’t release any more Android phones? [Nokia]
You can keep up on the latest headlines by following Liliputing on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.
Does anyone know where to send flowers/donations to Nokia?
Nokia isn’t dead, they’re just not going to be selling WP devices anymore… It’s like when IBM sold their Thinkpads to Lenovo… The company went on, they just didn’t sell Thinkpads anymore…
Nokia was never just a phone maker company, though that was a big part of their business for many years but this deal doesn’t mean they will never make another phone…
At least Neflix is granfathering current subscribers for some sort of period unlike Amazon. Too bad I’m not a current Netflix subscriber. I usually subscribe for a few months, watch the few things I like and then cancel my subscription after there’s nothing more I want to watch. After a year or so, I subscribe again for a few months.