Netflix Confirms New Mobile-Only Subscription Plan Following Lackluster Earnings Report

Netflix has been making some significant changes to how its pricing plans all over the world recently. The company released its latest earnings report for the second quarter of 2019 last night, and it’s not looking too good for the firm.

Following the recent pricing hikes, Netflix has lost around 130,000 subscribers in the United States. It’s also only gained 2.7 million global subscribers, much lower than the predicted 5 million. Netflix isn’t too disappointed with the results, though, blaming the loss in subscriber counts on the price increases. It also isn’t too scared of the upcoming competition from Apple, HBO, Disney, etc. — with CEO Reed Hastings claiming that its position in the market is “excellent”.

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Netflix is also now looking at new subscriber plans designed for specific regions to help it grow its business in markets like Asia. The company has been testing a low-cost, mobile-only plan in India as early as March of this year, and it’s confirmed the new plan in its quarterly earnings report.

“After several months of testing, we’ve decided to roll out a lower-priced mobile-screen plan in India to complement our existing plans. We believe this plan, which will launch in Q3, will be an effective way to introduce a larger number of people in India to Netflix and to further expand our business in a market where Pay TV ARPU is low (below $5),” Netflix noted. According to TechCrunch, Netflix isn’t saying exactly how much this new plan costs, or whether Netflix plans to bring it to other regions. But from what we have heard in the past, the new plan costs only Rs 250, which is half the price of its regular plan that comes at Rs 500. The new service only offers standard-quality streaming in a single device, by the way.

Netflix testing new low-cost plans could help it get an edge over all the upcoming streaming services. Considering the fact that not everyone can afford to pay for the full-fledged service in some markets, it’d make sense to offer cheaper plans that are specialised for customers in those regions. It’s not only making the service more accessible for customers, but it’s also allowing Netflix to grow its subscriber numbers without affecting its profit too much.

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Conversation 17 comments

  • mattbg

    Premium Member
    18 July, 2019 - 9:33 am

    <p>I recently unsubscribed. I don't know who has time to watch so many would-be 2-hour movies expanded to 10-part serials just to fill air space.</p>

  • will

    Premium Member
    18 July, 2019 - 10:36 am

    <p>The next 6 months will be interesting for Netflix. Right now when you go and browse the selection there are a lot of good options, however once Disney and some others launch there services you will see those removed. Most of what will be there are the shows they create. The problem is outside of a small handful of shows, most of what Netflix is doing is dumping lots of "junk" into the system. It is quantity vs quality.</p><p><br></p><p>Personally I would not mind if they released new episodes shows every week or daily vs the current model of an entire season at once. Right now everyone is getting into a patter of binge watching and that is really not that good. It would allow them to hold on to viewers longer AND give me something to look forward to. Let Stranger Things run over the summer or a few weeks.</p><p><br></p><p>Just my .0002 ;)</p>

    • lvthunder

      Premium Member
      18 July, 2019 - 10:58 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#443564">In reply to will:</a></em></blockquote><p>I agree with a lot of what you are saying. The issue with the junk is though is everyone can agree on what percentage is junk, but each show has people that really like it.</p><p><br></p><p>I think they should do the shows weekly like HBO does. I'm guessing Apple will do that with TV+ since they won't have a lot of shows at first.</p>

      • mattbg

        Premium Member
        18 July, 2019 - 5:54 pm

        <blockquote><em><a href="#443580">In reply to lvthunder:</a></em></blockquote><p>They’ve confirmed that this is part of their strategy – cost to produce vs. viewership.</p><p><br></p><p>i guess that’s a standard measure, but they don’t appear to consider it a failure unless the viewership doesn’t match their expectations, and the expectations are set by the budget.</p><p><br></p><p>By this measure, a lot of junk can be seen as successful. But hasn’t that always been the B-movie model?</p><p><br></p><p>They could be successful as a value-oriented B-roll provider, but this may be way out of whack with what the stock market expects of NFLX.</p>

    • jwpear

      Premium Member
      19 July, 2019 - 12:07 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#443564">In reply to will:</a></em></blockquote><p>I agree and don’t see how the binge model can work to hold subscribers long term as content creators pull their content exclusive to their own service. Weekly releases seem better, but I’m looking at this through middle age eyes. Would be interesting to see how my teen kids react to weekly releases of shows vs the entire season at once.</p><p><br></p><p>I don’t see that I will pay for each service on a monthly basis just to get access to some content. May do more like Paul and float on and off services, following the new content I’m interested in. We do that some now with services like Sling. Feels like this will be more common in future.</p>

  • derekabraham

    18 July, 2019 - 1:16 pm

    <p>I am sticking with Netflix because it is free with T-Mobile. I haven't watched any good movies on Netflix in the last year. There are few TV shows like Lucifer and Stranger Things (and Delhi Crime) where I get new content. But otherwise it is all reruns of Friends, Office, Parks and Recreation and most of these are going away.</p>

  • steveh

    18 July, 2019 - 2:11 pm

    <p>All though they are doing well with Netflix exclusives, they need more n"new" mainstream material.</p>

  • mikes_infl

    18 July, 2019 - 2:11 pm

    <p>I think Netflix was correct about why people left in the U.S. That's certainly the reason we stopped. But, we'll be returning. We decided that in order to make up for the price hike, we'd start shuffling which services we use. When the prices were lower, we kept active subscriptions on many of the services and our overall costs were less than the cable bill we used to have. </p><p><br></p><p>With the idea of saving a little here and there, we took an honest look at our "multimedia" expenditures and didn't like what we saw. We were originally only going to cut off the Netflix service for a month or two to make up for their price hike, but after we stopped using it for that first month, it was very easy to keep NOT using them. Now that some of the Netflix Originals are released we'll probably head back that way again, but we're not in any hurry. It's been 4 months now and we haven't noticed any loss in shows to watch.</p><p><br></p><p>Like they say, there are plenty of fish in the ocean.</p>

  • sparrow

    18 July, 2019 - 2:11 pm

    <p>No mystery…Netflix hired the Obamas to produce content, put Susan Rice on the board and inject a constant agenda of apocalyptic, climate-change oriented, in-house movies…</p><p>No mystery…nothing to see here…it has turned into crap…</p><p>Cancelled them last year…Amazon Prime and a couple of other pay sites replace them quite well…</p>

    • Thom77

      18 July, 2019 - 2:37 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#443605">In reply to sparrow:</a></em></blockquote><p><br></p><p>I agree .. and dont forget the show "Dear White People" which was disgraceful.</p><p><br></p><p>Of course, 10 other excuses will be made.</p><p><br></p><p>Apple better be paying attention though.</p><p><br></p><p> it will be fun to watch Netflix and apple compete for most woke content to the point of ridiculousness.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

    • Craig Smith

      18 July, 2019 - 10:41 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#443605">In reply to sparrow:</a></em></blockquote><p>You should probably consider cancelling Amazon Prime as well. They have many climate change oriented programs, including "Coping with Climate Change", "Climate Challenge", "How to Save the World", and "Rising Tides". Dozens of them.</p><p><br></p><p>They also seem to offer "Dear White People", the Netflix show, through their service. In his reply to you, Thom77 seemed concerned about this one. In fact, a lot of Netflix produced shows seem to also get distributed through Amazon Prime.</p><p><br></p><p>By using Amazon Prime, you are indirectly endorsing the production of Netflix material. You should probably start looking for another alternative that fully represents your views.</p><p><br></p>

    • jimchamplin

      Premium Member
      31 July, 2019 - 2:05 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#443605">In reply to sparrow:</a></em></blockquote><p>Yeah. That’s totally the reason. /s</p>

  • datameister

    18 July, 2019 - 10:23 pm

    <p>I would be interested to know how many Netflix subscribers watch shows on a mobile device. I don't watch any long form media on mobile personally. If it is longer than about 10 minutes I save it for a larger computer or TV screen.</p>

  • Greg Green

    25 July, 2019 - 7:24 am

    <p>Hollywood Reporter reports that Netflix stock has dropped each of the last nine days, losing $25B in market cap. Their real problem according to an analyst is that more than half of their most watched shows are owned by three studios who plan to have their own subscription service soon. When that happens the studios most likely will pull the shows from Netflix, taking more than half of their most watched shows.</p>

  • jimchamplin

    Premium Member
    31 July, 2019 - 2:03 pm

    <p>I’m mainly cheesed off because the price keeps going up and I get less for it. Sure, they have Stranger Things. Before that, the show that kept me around was Longmire.</p><p><br></p><p>But there’s not enough motion on back catalogs to keep me interested between original shows. I gave up waiting for them to get up to date on Better Call Saul.</p><p><br></p><p>Pretty much, the reason I started paying for Netflix in the first place – the movies and reruns – has become a pitiful joke. </p>

  • jazzpackages

    18 October, 2019 - 7:11 am

    <p><a href="https://jazzpackagess.blogspot.com/2019/09/Jazz-Free-Internet.html&quot; target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Jazz Free Internet</a><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> i think Netflix really want,s to change because Netflix really loss market cap..</span></p>

  • mikej18

    28 November, 2019 - 10:02 pm

    <p>Nextflix is great service, but I think Netflix should have more content, like Documentaries. </p>

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