Yeah as a programmer it seems that everyone around me underestimate by several magnitudes the amount of money and effort that goes into something like the Netflix infrastructure. It’s extremely frustrating because people always look at you with distrust when you say how much work it will take to develop a website. As a rule of thumb, the site’s apparent simplicity (for the end user) is correlated with the effort you put in.
That said, Netflix already had its infrastructure in place back when they had reasonable pricing. The recent greediness doesn’t reflect their costs suddenly going up, it’s just exponentially growing demand for profit and investors who want to cash in.