July 20 (Portaltic/EP) –
Netflix ha removed its basic plan without ads in the United States and the United Kingdom, as happened last June with Canada; a measure that has been announced at the same time that it has announced that the number of subscribers has increased in the last quarter.
The streaming content platform continues to make changes to its subscription plans in order to increase its revenue and drive more subscriptions. In this sense, the company decided remove basic ad-free plan in Canada in Juneto offer two options: the standard subscription with ads -CAD 5.99-, and the standard plan -CAD 16.49- as the next most affordable option.
Now, Netflix has taken the same decision in United States and United Kingdomwhere it has removed the basic subscription plan without ads, which was priced at $9.99 in the US and £6.99 in the UK, as reflected in its latest earnings report of the second trimester.
The basic plan allows you to see the entire Netflix catalog on a single device and no ads. Likewise, it supports viewing the content in HD quality and downloading series or movies is available. This option is the cheapest of Netflix’s ad-free offering. However, the company seems to be planning to get rid of it.
In this way, those new subscribers who do not want to see ads while enjoying the content of the platform, and who want to choose the cheapest option, should subscribe to the standard plan. Thus, US users will have to pay $16.49 per month and the British £10.99. That is, they will experience price increase of around five euros per month compared to the basic plan without ads.
ACCOUNT SHARING SUSPENDED IN ALL REMAINING COUNTRIES
Another of Netflix’s most controversial decisions has been the cessation of shared accounts between different households. In this way, it imposed that users choose a main location of their account, to limit access to the platform from another location different from that one.
For those users who want to continue sharing an account in different homes, Netflix offered the ability to subscribe via a sub-account with an additional cost of 5.99 euros per month (in the case of Spain).
As the platform itself has detailed in its latest earnings report, in May they expanded the measures for account sharing in more than 100 countrieswhich represents more than 80 percent of their income.
As a result, they have observed that “the cancellation reaction was low” and which, in fact, led to a “healthy conversion of borrowing households to full-pay Netflix memberships” as well as an “acceptance” of the sub-account feature with the additional members.
Now, the company has announced in this same report that it intends to address account sharing between households in “almost all other countries”such as Indonesia, Croatia, Kenya and India. Soon, it will begin to prohibit the use of shared accounts in these countries.
Also, the platform will not offer in these countries the possibility of creating sub-accounts. This is because, as he explained, they recently reduced prices in these countries and, furthermore, “penetration is still relatively low in many of them.”
SUBSCRIPTIONS CONTINUE TO INCREASE
Despite all these changes in the subscription plans of the platform, Netflix continues to increase the number of subscribers to its streaming content services. Specifically, in the second quarter of this year, the increase has been eight percent.
Netflix currently has 238.39 million active subscribers globallywhat translates into 5.89 million additional users compared to the previous quarter.
Regarding the earnings of the audiovisual content platform, Netflix has registered some benefits of 1,488 million dollars (1,327 million euros) in the second quarter of 2022, which represents an advance of 3.3 percent compared to the result of the same period of the previous year.
