Netflix’s Ad Tier Launches Today

Today is the big day for Netflix’s ad tier launch. The much-talked-about change to the Netflix subscription service introduces advertising for the first time, where ads will play during streams of your favorite Netflix shows and movies. It was reported back in September that the cheaper, ad-supported plan would be coming to Netflix on November 1st. This rumor turned out to be only a few days late, with Deadline reporting the Basic With Ads plan goes live at 9 a.m. PT in eight countries: the U.S., UK, Australia, Japan, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, and South Korea.

Netflix’s Basic With Ads plan is already live in Canada and Mexico, with Spain reportedly following on November 10th. The price for the ad-supported plan in the U.S. is $6.99 a month and comes at a time when other streamers like Disney+ are also going with ads. The ad version of Disney+ is reportedly set to launch in December, with Disney raising the prices for ad-free Disney+ and both versions of Hulu with and without ads.

How Does Netflix With Ads Work?

Since the majority of original content on Netflix was created without thought being given to adding ad breaks, work has been going on behind the scenes to fully integrate ads into the content. This involves new deals being made with partners. Netflix’s chief operating officer and product chief Greg Peters calls the ad-supported tier “a pro-consumer model” that will bring in “a lot more members,” though no projections have been offered. 

Peters estimates about 5-10% of programming will be missing from the Basic With Ads launch, which Peters counts as “a small minority of viewing.” The decisions on what’s included and not included is “all based on deals,” according to Peters, “so it’s not a specific studio. It’s mostly about what the state of the deal was and, again, we’ll work to reduce that number over time.”

There will be four to five minutes of ads per hour on the Basics With Ads plan, including series and movies. New additions to the Netflix catalog, like Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story, “will just have a pre-roll” that runs before the movie begins, Peters said. “We’ll try to preserve that sort of cinematic model there,” he added. Movies that have been on Netflix for a longer period of time are going the “traditional” route of pre-roll and mid-roll ads, with “less frequent” breaks.

Will you be signing up for the new ad-supported tier on Netflix? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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