T-Mobile is apparently downgrading the Netflix perks of ALL of its customers
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T-Mobile giveth and T-Mobile taketh away. That seems to be the best short summary of a week of conflicting news that's undoubtedly seen many of the "Un-carrier's" subscribers go from agony to ecstasy and agony again a lot more quickly and dramatically than anyone imagined at the very beginning of the new year.
First, an internal document leaked that suggested an important chunk of T-Mo's customers would be forced to a new Netflix Standard with Ads plan on the house starting later this month. While that's obviously unpleasant for streaming addicts with an aversion to commercials, the report didn't exactly come as a shock, being an unsurprising side effect to Netflix's Basic service tier retirement last year.
Coincidentally or not, T-Mobile had also just announced the impending addition of a sweet new streaming perk to everyone's plans, offering a nice and welcomed Hulu and hang alternative to your favorite Netflix and chill pastime that appeared to make everything right with the world again.
Unfortunately, this saga is far from over, as there are now official and unofficial reasons to believe pretty much all of T-Mobile's subscribers will be negatively impacted by the operator's looming Netflix revisions. It's not just folks who previously received "Basic" streaming access for free, but also those with Standard and even Premium plans looking at a downgrade to Standard with Ads service.
The network-wide changes are still scheduled to come into effect on January 24 for existing T-Mobile users, and on Magenta's official website, the Go5G Plus and Go5G Next plans have already had their terms revised to include "Netflix Standard with ads ON US" as one of the key benefits.
That's still something you won't have to pay a dime for, which is certainly nice, but given that these unlimited wireless plans start at a rather steep $90 and $100 a month respectively, we can totally understand why one would expect to get slightly more valuable perks included. Of course, that's where Hulu comes in, as well as MLB and all the other free stuff, but it's still going to be hard to appease those customers who used to get no ads with their complimentary Netflix Standard or Premium subscriptions and now need to accept what looks like a completely unjustified downgrade.
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