Netflix intends to raise the price of its online video service to as much as $10 a month sometime during the next three months to help finance content acquisition and improve its streamed video experience. But for up to two years, the new price will probably not impact existing customers.

CEO Reed Hastings announced in a first-quarter earnings letter to shareholders that Netflix intends to raise prices by $1 or $2 a month, initially only applying to new members:

“In the U.S. we have greatly improved our content selection since we introduced our streaming plan in 2010 at $7.99 per month. Our current view is to do a one or two dollar increase, depending on the country, later this quarter for new members only. Existing members would stay at current pricing ($7.99 in the U.S.) for a generous time period.

Netflix has already raised prices for some of its European customers after a rate hike experiment in Ireland was accepted by customers. New customers have to pay the new rate immediately, but existing members in good standing are unaffected for two years before rates reset.

In a separate announcement, Netflix today also formally announced its opposition to the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger.

If the Comcast and Time Warner Cable merger is approved, the combined company’s footprint will pass over 60 percent of U.S. broadband households, after the proposed divestiture, with most of those homes having Comcast as the only option for truly high-speed broadband (>10Mbps). As DSL fades in favor of cable Internet, Comcast could control high-speed broadband to the majority of American homes. Comcast is already dominant enough to be able to capture unprecedented fees from transit providers and services such as Netflix. The combined company would possess even more anticompetitive leverage to charge arbitrary interconnection tolls for access to their customers. For this reason, Netflix opposes this merger.