Published in El Pais, July 30th 2019.
As everyone is aware Netflix is in most households as the days of watching your favourite show at a set time are long gone. Thanks to on demand streaming we can watch what we want no matter the time of day, leading to households all over the world cutting traditional cable services. The service has become so popular that it has run into a problem, their growth is slowing down as they are running out of potential customers since almost everyone has a Netflix account. To fix this Netflix has a new outside the box strategy that could change the streaming game.
The current price set by Netflix for basic streaming is $13 (2019), quite the increase from the original price of $8 (2014) all those years ago. And it is likely they will continue to increase the price in the years to come. One country, India, is now able to subscribe to the streaming services at a much cheaper rate. The people of India can now subscribe to it for less than $3 but this service is only available on mobile devices.
The strategy is quite creative as in India many people rely on their smartphone for all their computing needs and do not even own a computer. This means they will likely be ok with the limited screening options and with the lower resolution that comes with mobile streaming the costs will be much lower for the Netflix as well.
What does this mean for the rest of the world? Netflix will surely be approaching India as sort of a pilot project. Particularly in poorer countries where for many the only computing device they own will be their smart phone. Should this look like to be a profitable decision they will likely roll out this offer to the rest of the world. It will be interesting to see how India will react to this.
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