Netflix has increased the price of its streaming service for the first time in three years. The service price hike will only affect new subscribers, however, and not the existing ones (for a couple of years).

The new service now costs $8.99 per month so the price was increased by a $1 more. For those who do not use HD services or care about streaming from multiple devices at once, there is a new $7.99 option available.

The reason for this price change has to do with Netflix wanting to expand its service offerings.

"To continue to add more movies and TV shows, we are increasing the price of our $7.99-a-month streaming plan by $1 to $8.99," Netflix said in an e-mail to BusinessWeek.

Existing customers will retain the ability to stream on two devices at once. Although $1 may not seem much for most consumers, this is a change that affects Netflix users worldwide and in some regions a 13% increase may be quite a bit to handle on the wallet. There is also a plan now in place for $11.99 that allows users to stream Netflix from four devices at once.

It would be nice for Netflix to add more recent TV show episodes to its streaming services or offer additional originals like its "House of Cards" series. For a $1 more per month, we may end up getting a lot more as streaming is starting to become more widespread.

However, Netflix has always toyed with the idea of adding more recent shows and movies and it still has to compete with big movie studios and Time Warner to really take off - who do not want streaming to take over their business models. There are a lot of special interests that are still holding streaming back from dominating the living room with offerings.

It will be interesting to see Netflix truly try to compete with new content streaming on a more constant basis and become a cable TV replacement one day. Price hikes should be expected if we want more new content to keep being added.