Netflix Rolling Out Free Upgrades for Ad-Supported Tier

Though Netflix’s latest earnings call had most talking about their intentions to make users pay for password-sharing, the streamer did at least announce some subscribers are about to get more bang for their buck. In late 2022 Netflix rolled out their “Basic With Ads” pricing plan, a new tier that has slowly been gaining traction for the streaming service. When it was first rolled out this new tier came with some restrictions however. At launch the Basic With Ads plan on Netflix maxed out at 720p resolution for subscribers and could only be watched on one screen at a time. Now both of those things are about to change.  

In Netflix’s latest letter to shareholders for their quarterly investment call, the streamer confirmed Basic With Ads subscribers are about to get two big upgrades. This comes after reportedly being very pleased with how the tier has been received by subscribers. They write, ” In the US for instance, our ads plan already has a total ARM (subscription + ads) greater than our standard plan. So this month we’ll upgrade the feature set of our ads plan to include 1080p versus 720p video quality and two concurrent streams in all 12 ads markets – starting with Canada and Spain today. We believe these enhancements will make our offering even more attractive to a broader set of consumers and further strengthen engagement for existing and new subscribers to the ads plan.” 

As of this writing the Basic with ads plan remains $6.99 per month. The tier also comes with restrictions on what consent is available to subscribers. Some shows like House of Cards, The Last Kingdom, and Peaky Blinders can’t be watched with the Basic With Ads tier, while some movies are also unavailable on the plan. It seems unlikely that this will be changed as easily as the higher resolution and extra screens per use, but the Basic With Ads tier does still have almost everything that Netflix without ads has too.

“Engagement on our ads tier is above our initial expectations and, as expected, we’ve seen very little switching from our standard and premium plans,” Netflix added. “Also, thanks to our most recent set of licensing deals, our ad-supported plan now has on average ~95% content parity globally (by viewing) with our ads-free plans, including all the latest Netflix shows and movies. On the advertiser side, we are launching a programmatic private marketplace to enable more buying options for Netflix ad inventory using Microsoft’s sales platform. Our partnerships with Integral Ad Science and Double Verify are also now live – validating campaign engagement of ads viewership on Netflix.”

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