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[Earleen Statham]

Depending on your subscription plan, the price hike adds up to an extra $24 or $36 you pay each year to the streaming service. Below, CNBC Select shares some ways to save on (and even benefit from) your Netflix subscription.

While you're unlikely to be happy about paying a higher monthly Netflix bill, it does mean you earn a bit more from that 6% cash back. Amex's cash back is earned in the form of Reward Dollars, which cardholders can then use as a statement credit to lower their credit card balance.

And with the U.S. Bank Cash+ Visa Signature Card, cardholders can choose to earn 5% cash back on two bonus categories each quarter, on their first $2,000 in combined eligible net purchases, then 1%. Television, internet and streaming services are counted as a bonus category and U.S. Bank's website lists Netflix as a sample qualifying merchant. Again, you can use this cash back to essentially lower your credit card bill.

T-Mobile has a "Netflix On Us" deal where qualifying cell phone plans get a free Netflix subscription. Those who aren't happy with their current cell phone provider should consider this benefit, which not only makes Netflix complimentary but also consolidates your streaming and cell phone bill.

Netflix allows you to pause your membership and come back to it. This can give you a break from the monthly subscription if you're looking to cut costs or if you're just not watching a particular show at the moment.

You just have to connect the bank account you use to pay your Netflix subscription to Experian Boost, and Experian will add your payments to your Experian credit file. Consumers can link positive payment data as far back as 24 months. Experian Boost also includes access to your FICO Score and Experian free credit monitoring that alerts you to changes on your credit report, such as new account openings in your name and balance updates.

Basic and Premium plan Netflix subscribers will now pay a little more each month for the streaming service. To help save on this cost, get a credit card that rewards streaming purchases, switch your phone plan to T-Mobile or take a pause on your subscription. And, while you're paying more for it, make sure that monthly Netflix bill is helping your credit with Experian Boost.

At CNBC Select, our mission is to provide our readers with high-quality service journalism and comprehensive consumer advice so they can make informed decisions with their money. Every personal finance article is based on rigorous reporting by our team of expert writers and editors with extensive knowledge of personal finance products. While CNBC Select earns a commission from affiliate partners on many offers and links, we create all our content without input from our commercial team or any outside third parties, and we pride ourselves on our journalistic standards and ethics.

Last October, Netflix hiked prices for the second time in less than two years. The current monthly pricing for the Netflix Standard plan with ads is $6.99. Without ads, the Standard plan will run you $15.49 a month and the Premium plan will cost $22.99.

The company is cracking down on customers who share their accounts with people outside a single geographic household, introducing an $8 monthly charge in a long-threatened bid to retain customers and stanch a slowdown in subscription growth. Netflix uses location tracking to ensure subscribed users are logged in at a single home subscriber base, which is sure to test users already sensitive to growing threats to their online privacy.

Since the end of June, Netflix has blocked devices that attempt to access a Netflix account without paying the proper fees, according to TechRadar. Subscribers in a compliant household can keep using the service on the road, like on laptops or hotel TVs, without paying additional fees.

The Financial Times previously reported that Netflix had alerted internet provider partners in the UK that they should expect angry calls and support questions about the sharing price hike and location tracking features.

This move suggested that despite Netflix's best efforts, the company predicted a large number of subscribers would only detect the change when Netflix demanded an extra $8 for sharing the account outside their new "home" location.

Ben Demers manages digital content and engagement at Kiplinger, informing readers through a range of personal finance articles, e-newsletters, social media, syndicated content, and videos. He is passionate about helping people lead their best lives through sound financial behavior, particularly saving money at home and avoiding scams and identity theft. Ben graduated with an M.P.S. from Georgetown University and a B.A. from Vassar College. He joined Kiplinger in May 2017.","contributorText":"With contributions from","contributors":["name":"Esther D\u2019Amico","role":"Senior News Editor","link":"href":"https:\/\/www.kiplinger.com\/author\/esther-d-amico"]}), " -0-11/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Ben DemersSocial Links NavigationAudience Engagement Manager, Kiplinger.comBen Demers manages digital content and engagement at Kiplinger, informing readers through a range of personal finance articles, e-newsletters, social media, syndicated content, and videos. He is passionate about helping people lead their best lives through sound financial behavior, particularly saving money at home and avoiding scams and identity theft. Ben graduated with an M.P.S. from Georgetown University and a B.A. from Vassar College. He joined Kiplinger in May 2017.

I pulled this chapter together from dozens of sources that were at times somewhat contradictory. Facts on the ground change over time and depend who is telling the story and what audience they're addressing. I tried to create as coherent a narrative as I could. If there are any errors I'd be more than happy to fix them. Keep in mind this article is not a technical deep dive. It's a big picture type article. For example, I don't mention the word microservice even once :-)

Given our discussion in the What is Cloud Computing? chapter, you might expect Netflix to serve video using AWS. Press play in a Netflix application and video stored in S3 would be streamed from S3, over the internet, directly to your device.

Another relevant factoid is Netflix is subscription based. Members pay Netflix monthly and can cancel at any time. When you press play to chill on Netflix, it had better work. Unhappy members unsubscribe.

The client is the user interface on any device used to browse and play Netflix videos. It could be an app on your iPhone, a website on your desktop computer, or even an app on your Smart TV. Netflix controls each and every client for each and every device.

Everything that happens before you hit play happens in the backend, which runs in AWS. That includes things like preparing all new incoming video and handling requests from all apps, websites, TVs, and other devices.

In 2007 Netflix introduced their streaming video-on-demand service that allowed subscribers to stream television series and films via the Netflix website on personal computers, or the Netflix software on a variety of supported platforms, including smartphones and tablets, digital media players, video game consoles, and smart TVs.

Netflix succeeded. Netflix certainly executed well, but they were late to the game, and that helped them. By 2007 the internet was fast enough and cheap enough to support streaming video services. That was never the case before. The addition of fast, low-cost mobile bandwidth and the introduction of powerful mobile devices like smart phones and tablets, has made it easier and cheaper for anyone to stream video at any time from anywhere. Timing is everything.

Building out a datacenter is a lot of work. Ordering equipment takes a long time. Installing and getting all the equipment working takes a long time. And as soon they got everything working they would run out of capacity, and the whole process had to start over again.

The long lead times for equipment forced Netflix to adopt what is known as a vertical scaling strategy. Netflix made big programs that ran on big computers. This approach is called building a monolith. One program did everything.

What Netflix was good at was delivering video to their members. Netflix would rather concentrate on getting better at delivering video rather than getting better at building datacenters. Building datacenters was not a competitive advantage for Netflix, delivering video is.

It took more than eight years for Netflix to complete the process of moving from their own datacenters to AWS. During that period Netflix grew its number of streaming customers eightfold. Netflix now runs on several hundred thousand EC2 instances.

The advantage of having three regions is that any one region can fail, and the other regions will step in handle all the members in the failed region. When a region fails, Netflix calls this evacuating a region.

The header image is meant to intrigue you, to draw you into selecting a video. The idea is the more compelling the header image, the more likely you are to watch a video. And the more videos you watch, the less likely you are to unsubscribe from Netflix.

The first thing Netflix does is spend a lot of time validating the video. It looks for digital artifacts, color changes, or missing frames that may have been caused by previous transcoding attempts or data transmission problems.

A pipeline is simply a series of steps data is put through to make it ready for use, much like an assembly line in a factory. More than 70 different pieces of software have a hand in creating every video.

The idea behind a CDN is simple: put video as close as possible to users by spreading computers throughout the world. When a user wants to watch a video, find the nearest computer with the video on it and stream to the device from there.

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