In developing countries, Netflix is often been used by a few with unlimited access to fast internet or have free WiFi which makes it a worthwhile option for them as its way cheaper than the competition in terms of subscriptions. As the company plans to increase the number of customers they have, they have to come up with more innovative ways to grow and this means tapping to more markets.
Netflix has confirmed it will officially launch a new plan that only lets customers stream content on a mobile device, and the company has finalized its test using India as a benchmark. The plan, set to launch in the third quarter and will be priced lower than the company’s existing subscriptions.
In a letter to investors released yesterday, Netflix said the mobile-only plan “will be an effective way to introduce a larger number of people in countries like India to Netflix and to further expand our business in a market where Pay TV ARPU (average revenue per user) is low (below $5).”
The streaming company announced the new plan alongside financial results that revealed that they has missed their customer growth target which was way off the mark of the company’s forecast. Q2 2019 has seen only 2.7 million customers increase compared to the foretasted 5 million. That miss is partially being attributed to price hikes they did in the USA which is their largest market and has not paid off in terms of customer growth. So they have now gone in the opposite direction and come up with a cheaper plan. Which we think is still missing the target as the plan is geographically restricted to exclude their biggest market.
As for where else this plan might eventually become available, for now Netflix is only saying that it will “continue to learn more after launch of this plan.” Netflix’s basic plan limits video stream quality to standard definition (480p), so it’s almost certain that an even cheaper mobile tier would have the same restriction in place.
Obviously phones are covered here, but how far does Netflix’s definition of mobile device go? Can this subscription be used on Android tablets or the iPad? All these questions will be answered by Netflix in due course time.
