Netflix Announces ‘Basic With Ads’ Subscription Tier For $7 A Month

Streaming service Netflix has made the landmark announcement that they will be incorporating ads into a cheaper subscription level, which will launch on November 3 in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, the UK and the United States.

Netflix COO Greg Peters outlined the plan in a blog post.

The $6.99 price tag is cheaper than other services with ad-supported sub tiers out there, with streamers Disney+ and the Disney-owned Hulu having ad plans for $7.99 monthly, though Disney+ will be launching this in December.

HBO Max also has a plan with ads for $10 a month compared to $15 without. Peters claimed the total time of ad viewing would be “4 to 5 minutes of ads per hours,” but there are other drawbacks to this basic plan as well.

Peters also noted that video quality will be capped at 720p the basic plan, which will look fine on a tablet or laptop but may not live up to some viewer’s standards on larger TVs. You also won’t be able to download titles for offline viewing, and even some titles in Netflix’s library won’t be available due to “licensing restrictions.”

With the language of “licensing,” being used in the post, this implies that the Netflix Originals catalog will be fully available. Peters also said that the number of unavailable titles was “limited” and that they are “working on” getting more of these titles on the plan.

At the moment, it doesn’t seem like they’ll be raising the prices of their Basic tier, which is $10/month, and their Standard tier, which is $15.49/month.

For any gamers that are worried about getting ads in the middle of a Netflix Games session, they have also clarified that ads will only play for their Film and TV content.

In an interview with Deadline, Peters also offered more clarity on ad rollouts with certain film releases, using the upcoming Knives Out 2 as an example. He said that notable originals premiering on the service “will just have a pre-roll” of ads, in contrast to ones that have been on for longer which may have more ads in the middle.

It is certainly strange to see streamers, which for a long time used the lack of advertising as a major selling point to beef up their numbers of subscribers, now going back to the old strategies of network TV and basic cable after all those years.

There wasn’t a huge outcry or backlash to this announcement, but many fans lamented the state of streamers at the moment, and the Netflix stock price took a small 1% hit down to $230 a share at the end of last week.

Here’s a useful graphic of some relevant streamer’s subscription plans from Cartoon Crave.