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Rising prices for Netflix (NFLX) subscriptions have been widely seen as a foregone conclusion for investors who expect them to help fund content and widen margins. But what if the company goes in the other direction?

That question—fueled by a Monday Bloomberg story in which CEO Reed Hastings said Netflix might experiment with a lower-priced service—might be contributing to the stock’s 3.1% slide in Monday trading.

The story, by Lucas Shaw, suggested that rather than lowering prices for its current service options, it might introduce another option with different features. Netflix’s base plan currently costs $8 a month, the cheapest of three that top out at $14.

A tiered service would echo others seen in streaming media. Consortium-owned Hulu, for example, offers its base video service with “limited or no commercials” starting at $7.99 a month, with the option to pay more to nix commercials entirely. (Nicholas Jasinski updated Barron’s readers on Hulu in September.)

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In music, Spotify Technology (SPOT) offers a free, ad-supported service from which it hopes users will upgrade.

Meanwhile, some analysts have noted that Netflix may not have as much pricing power in its key overseas growth markets as it does in the U.S. (The company recently revealed several original movies planned for India.)

Meanwhile, the expectation that the core Netflix service is of sufficient value to consumers that the company can raise prices was backed Monday by PiperJaffray analyst Michael Olson, who said a survey of Netflix users indicated a broad sense that the quality of the service’s content has improved over the last year.

“The primary determinant in the ability of Netflix to raise price is subscriber perception of content quality,” Olson wrote. “As long as the vast majority of subscribers perceive that the service is improving, Netflix will be positioned to periodically increase prices.”

Olson, who has a $430 price target on Netflix stock that is roughly 5% above Factset’s average, expects the company’s average revenue per user to rise 3% through 2020 despite having growth about 25% since 2016.

Netflix stock, up 53% in 2018, closed Monday around $294.

This story has been updated since it was first published to reflect share price movement.

Email David Marino-Nachison at david.marino-nachison@barrons.com. Follow him at @marinonachison and follow Barron’s Next at @barronsnext.