The furor may have died down over the Netflix pricing scheme in the week or so since it was introduced, but there's no doubt there will be some fallout in the long run. Business Insider has said that as many as 41% of their users plan on canceling the service. though it should be said that this poll isn't entirely scientific. It was taken in the immediate reaction to the announcement and only a specific sampling of their users. The site even admitted that the poll was informal. A similar poll by Geekwire said their 33% of their users would be sending back their red envelopes for good. In both polls, very few users said they'd keep the DVDs and Streaming options.
This is hardly the first time the internet has gone to the mattresses over having to pay for things. The heady days of yore now known as the Napster era was lousy with stories like this. People had long used the internet to circumvent copyright laws, but Napster took it to the mainstream. All you had to do was type in "Metalica" and you could piss off Kirk Hammett in seconds, and many many people did just that. It was very obviously against the law, but no one cared. Piracy is cool and laws aren't. It's a simple fact of life.
After Napster was shut down, a thousand other services sprung up in its stead. Morpheus, Limewire, Kazaa, Soulseek and other programs with other terrible names remained the bane of the recording industry for years. They were untouchable, so the Recording Industry Artists of America had to go after the users themselves, and RIAA became a four letter word. Shortly after this whole mess, the iTunes music store launched, sold billions of songs, and people started focussing more on the RIAA's other legion of problems. Piracy remains a problem in music, but with so many other ways to get music, legally and cheaply, the issue has been largely swept away.
Another infamous tale of internet entitlement happened recently in the world of gaming. A few months ago, Sony announced that it would no longer allow users to install Linux onto their PS3s. This might be very confusing to some people, but let's oversimplify it to "It would make it easier to play pirated games". Sony, learning nothing from the RIAA, went after users who downloaded program that allowed Linux on the PS3 after all. Hackers broke into the Playstation Network and started rooting around in their databases, where millions of peoples' credit card information was kept. Sony pulled the plug on their network and all PS3s remained offline for weeks. Piracy has been a big problem of their handheld system, the PSP and Sony was trying to protect their flagship console, albeit in a sort of scummy way.
Games on the PC have been hit so hard with the pirate bug that many game companies either don't develop for the PC anymore or just don't expect to make money on them. Cliff Blezinski of Epic Games has said that piracy is the reason he doesn't want his high end games to be on the PC at all saying "The persons who is savvy enough to [...] have a good PC is a person who is savvy enough to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Steam, a program where people can legally pay for and download games instantly, has recently helped make PC games relevant again. Now individual publishers like Blizzard and Electronic Arts, have their own systems in place like Steam and the environment is getting better and better for game developers
The point of all this is that people are willing to pay for their content if it is made available to them quickly and easily. Most people don't want to steal, but do so because it's the easiest way to get the things they want, and people love easy things. Netflix is just about the easiest way to get movies there is. but people are still up in arms about the price. On Demand services are clearly the way things are heading for the movie industry, but they don't seem to know it. Speculation has it that one reason for the price increase is because when Netflix has to renew their deals with the studios, the price will be significantly higher. If Netflix can't renew these contracts and those studios' catalogs disappear from the service, it's not a hard line to draw to increased piracy.
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