Netflix 1 Year Tv Plan
Frida Kosofsky
The basic plan is not displayed as an option for U.S. subscribers on its Plan and Pricing page for U.S. customers. The company quit offering the basic plan for new subscribers in July 2023, but allowed basic plan customers to remain on the subscription so long as they didn't cancel or change plans.
Netflix, which began offering a "standard with ads" tier in November 2022, said the plan's "attractiveness" led to a 34% increase in ad-supported subscriptions from the prior quarter. The company reported a record 277.65 million subscribers across all tiers in the second quarter, up 16.5% year-over-year.
Netflix subscribers in the U.S. and in France who are currently on the Basic plan will have to choose a new plan, the company said in a statement to USA TODAY. Those members impacted will get an email starting today, the company said.
Even without the basic, ad-free offering, Netflix represents "a very strong offering for our members," when you consider the $6.99 monthly ad-supported option, said co-CEO Greg Peters, during a videoconference about the company's second quarter performance Thursday.
"Essentially, we're providing them a better experience: two streams versus one. We've got higher definition. We got downloads. And, of course, all at a lower price," he said. "And for members who don't want that ads experience, they, of course, can choose our ad-free Standard or Premium plans."
Netflix added more than 8 million subscribers in the second quarter, benefiting from the return of series such as "Bridgerton," and "Baby Reindeer" and the live event "The Roast of Tom Brady," as well as a password-sharing crackdown.
Total number of subscribers grew to more than 277.6 million, an increase of 16.5%, the company said. Netflix forecast lower subscriber additions in the current quarter (July-Sept.) than in the same period last year, when the streaming company added more than 8.7 million.
Not only is the NFL playing on a Wednesday for only the third time since 1950, it brought on Netflix to carry the games. Netflix will stream two Christmas Day games globally as part of a three-year deal announced Wednesday as the league unveiled the regular-season schedule.
With the league continuing to make international inroads, including five games abroad this season, the prospect of partnering with Netflix was too good to pass up. Netflix has 270 million paid memberships in over 190 countries
Hans Schroeder, the executive vice president of NFL Media, said team owners meeting in March were presented with a plan where teams playing on Christmas Day would have their Week 16 games on Saturday, which would give them the same amount of prep time they normally have in a short week when playing on Sunday and Thursday.
The Jan. 13 AFC wild-card playoff game between the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs on Peacock averaged 23 million, a record for the most-watched event on a streaming service. It also surpassed the audiences for the Saturday night wild-card playoff games that were shown on NBC in two of the past three years.
Netflix's announcement of its lower-cost Basic with Ads plan comes after the company this year suffered a drop in subscribers for the first time in more than a decade. Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
At $6.99 per month, the Basic with Ads plan will include 15-to-30-second ads before and during shows and films, as well as have a smaller selection of content due to licensing restrictions. Ads will appear, on average, for a total of four to five minutes per hour.
The announcement comes after the company this year suffered a drop in subscribers for the first time in more than a decade, losing as many as 200,000 in this year's first quarter. The streaming giant laid off at least 150 employees and dozens of contractors and part-time workers in May.
As Netflix struggles to hold onto its subscribers, streaming competitor Disney+ is drawing in millions of subscribers. The Walt Disney Co. announced in August that Disney+ added 14.4 million subscribers in the quarter ending June 30.
In a shareholder letter from Tuesday, the streaming service said it's looking to "retire" its cheapest ad-free plan in "some of our ads countries." Netflix will implement the change in Canada and the U.K. in the second quarter of the year before "taking it from there," the letter said.
"As we invest in and improve Netflix, we'll occasionally ask our members to pay a little extra to reflect those improvements, which in turn helps drive the positive flywheel of additional investment to further improve and grow our service," according to the shareholder letter.
Last year, Netflix stopped allowing new and returning subscribers in the U.S., U.K. and Canada to select its basic plan. American subscribers who were grandfathered into Netflix's basic plan saw a price hike last year after Netflix raised that plan's price from $9.99 to $11.99 a month. The company also hiked the price of its costliest plan in the U.S. to $22.99.
The current lowest-tier plan available for Netflix newcomers is the $6.99-per-month ad-supported plan. Some TV shows and movies are not available under the plan. The cheapest ad-free plan for newcomers is the $15.49-per-month standard plan.
According to Netflix, the ads plan currently accounts for 40% of new sign-ups in ad markets. The company said it added 13.1 million subscribers last quarter, boosting its total to around 260 million globally.
The streamer initially announced its decision to completely phase it out in a letter to shareholders earlier this year, and started the permanent discontinuation in the UK and Canada in the second quarter of 2024. Users have begun to see on-screen notifications showing a deadline to upgrade subscriptions. Additionally, Netflix started moving forward with shutting down the Basic subscription option in select regions where the ad-based version is available.
During Netflix's earnings call in January, co-CEO Greg Peters highlighted the value of the ad-supported subscription versus the Basic plan, pointing out that the $7 option offers two streams, better video quality and downloads.
The streaming service cited its entertainment value and highlighted its expanding video games lineup and live sports programming. After testing the live streaming waters with a comedy special and golf tournament, Netflix is diving deeper into live sports. It streamed a tennis match between Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz this past March, and the media giant inked a deal with World Wrestling Entertainment.
Starting January 2025, wrestling fans in the US, UK, Canada and Latin America can watch live Monday Night Raw matches on the platform, with additional regions to come. Netflix will also be the destination for international subscribers who want to watch Smackdown, WrestleMania and other popular WWE shows.
2. Users might not build a usage habit in a month or two but they are likelier to build a dependency if they use the software for a year, which means lower churn rates even when the year ends, compared to month-on-month churn. Sometimes, a month is simply not enough time to learn and implement a tool so as to realize its value.
As always, content intensity matters more than content consistency. With so many options, quality beats quantity when it comes to habit-formation and memorability. And that kind of quality is hard to deliver month on month for anyone, let alone Netflix.
The result is that users cancel subscriptions and only resubscribe for a month or two when some hot release is doing the rounds on social media, only to cancel their subscriptions again once they're done watching the show. Especially when it is super easy to cancel and then resubscribe, why wouldn't I cancel and just come back on demand, when I feel like it?
Furthermore, annual plans might allow Netflix to give better prices and higher discounts, making the value proposition a lot sweeter for people who currently keep subscribed throughout the year, but pay monthly.
Netflix is also making basic plans unavailable to new customers in several countries, including the UK and US. Basic plans in those countries have now been replaced with standard subscriptions with ads. Ad-supported plans are much more affordable, costing 4.99 per month in the UK and $6.99 per month in the US.
Please note: the prices included in our study are the base price as advertised by Netflix. They do not include the various taxes and other charges users may face. We are aware that several countries, including Argentina, have these charges but our study focuses on the price charged by Netflix.
Second, we evaluated the cost per month in each country and how these shape up against others (based on current exchange rates at the time of writing). We have also analyzed the 13 countries with ad-based subscriptions (Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Guernsey, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, South Korea, UK, and US) separately to see how these plans compare.
At the other end of the scale are a number of African and European countries and Fiji where none of their plans are cost-effective, despite recent library growth across the majority of these countries. This is due to extortionate monthly costs (Liechtenstein and Switzerland) or library sizes that are more than three times below average (Zambia, Seychelles, Uganda).
The homeland of Netflix itself, the US, also features as one of the least cost-effective countries across all of its plans. This is, again, due to its average library size and above-average monthly costs. It ranks as the eleventh, twenty-first, and seventeenth least cost-effective country for its basic, standard, and premium plans respectively.
One of the biggest advantages of streaming platforms over standard TV channels is their lack of adverts. So are the cheaper plans with ads on Netflix worth it? And do they offer the best value for money when we compare them to basic plans without ads from around the world?
It probably goes without saying that all 13 countries save a reasonable amount of money per title when opting for the standard plan with ads. But as the above table demonstrates, some get a better deal than others.
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