Netflix has removed their basic ad-free plan on USA and in 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 to eliminate in June the basic plan without ads in Canadato offer two options: the standard subscription with ads -for C$5.99-, and the standard plan -for C$16.49- as the next most affordable option.
Now, Netflix It has made the same decision in the United States and the United Kingdom, where it has removed the basic subscription plan without ads, which was priced at $9.99 in the United States and £6.99 in the United Kingdom, as reflected in its latest Q2 earnings report.
The basic plan allows you to see the entire catalog of Netflix on a single device and without ads. Likewise, it supports viewing the content in HD quality and downloading series or movies is available. This option is the cheapest of the ad-free offer of Netflix. However, the company seems to be planning to get rid of it.
In this way, those subscribers new ones 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 British users £10.99. That is, they will experience a price increase of around five euros per month compared to the basic plan without ads.
Account sharing suspended in all remaining countries
Another of the most controversial decisions of Netflix 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 households, Netflix offered the possibility of subscribing through a subaccount at 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 countries, which represents more than 80 percent of their income.
As a result, they have observed that “cancellation reaction was low” and that, in fact, it led to a “healthy conversion of borrowing households to memberships of Netflix payment in full”, as well as an “acceptance” of the subaccount function with the additional members.
Now, the company has announced in this same report that it intends to address the sharing of accounts between households in “almost all the remaining countries”, such as Indonesia, Croatia, Kenya and India. Soon, it will begin to prohibit the use of shared accounts in these countries.
Likewise, the platform will not offer the possibility of creating sub-accounts in these countries. This is because, as he explained, they recently reduced prices in these countries and, furthermore, “penetration continues to be relatively low in many of them.”
Subscriptions continue to rise
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 globally, which translates to 5.89 million additional users from the previous quarter.
Regarding the earnings of the audiovisual content platform, Netflix has registered profits 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.
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