The streaming story of 2022 might be the incursion of advertisements permeating our viewing enjoyment on many of the major streaming services.
Most notable among those is Netflix, which reversed a long-held company tenet when introducing Netflix Basic with Ads this autumn. Now the company’s CEO says there’ll be more ad-based offerings over time, alongside the new £4.99 option, which limits users to 720p resolution, minus support for offline-downloads.
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“We have multiple tiers today, so it’s likely we’ll have multiple ad tiers over time, but nothing to talk about yet,” Sarandos said (via CNBC). “And the product itself will evolve, I suspect, pretty dramatically, but slowly, gradually.”
What else could Netflix add? Well it’s plausible users could offer ad-based versions of the tiers that support multiple displays, offline downloads and even the 4K HDR content. It’s also possible it could launch a tier with less ads than the 30-second commercial spots that amount to an average of four-minutes per hour.
Sarandos also said he “was wrong” about whether Netflix with ads could be successful. He added: “I was wrong about that. Hulu proved you could do that at scale and offer customers lower prices. We did switch on that. I wish we had flipped a few years earlier on that, but we’ll catch up.”
The comments came just before Disney+ launched its own ad-supported offering in the United States. The Disney+ Basic tier is $7.99 a month, which is what the regular offering did cost.
The standard subscription is now labelled “Premium” with no other change in the experience and is now $10.99 a month. The choice for Disney+ subscribers is clear: pay $3 a month more for the experience or put up with ads.
The tier will launch in the UK next year.