I've said this here before (though some seem to have disliked it). The Netflix UX and video quality are leagues ahead of Amazon Prime Video. Hotstar is a big laggard and far, far behind in every single aspect except for the amount of Indian content it has.<p>India is a highly price sensitive country, with absolutely no customer loyalty in most industry sectors. Nothing can beat free (which is where Hotstar is stuck, competing with YouTube).<p>It will be a tough act for Netflix to make anything from this plan. For this particular price point, restricted to mobile and a single screen at a time, what matters to this audience segment would be more Indian content. Netflix lags on that aspect quite a bit. It has some good Indian language originals, but India is a huge country with 22 official languages (and several hundreds more of unofficial languages), and these originals with a mix of Hindi and English may not appeal to a very wide audience. At the very least, it should voice dub shows in other languages. A better approach would be to use the diverse talent of content creators across languages and states, and provide those with a voice dub in other languages.<p>India as a country produces more than 1000 movies every year. While most are not worth watching (for movie buffs), there are several gems if one looks at all the languages and picks the best among those.<p>Netflix should focus strongly on licensing content produced by others and get recent releases if it wants to keep up in the Indian market. Amazon Prime is very quick in getting recently released Indian language movies on its platform. Hotstar may be similar too.<p>Edit and addendum:<p>Actually, on further thought, this plan doesn't make much sense at all by itself. Many people in India share Netflix accounts with friends or family and share the costs too. Such people would be much better off with the highest plan for Rs.800 a month while having five profiles, four simultaneous screens (shared with three other people), flexibility to watch on any device (not just mobile), using 4K quality if desired, etc. Sharing that with three others (four in total) brings the cost to Rs.200 per person, which is just one rupee more than this mobile plan for Rs.199.<p>It's going to be even tougher for Netflix to make money through this plan without more partnerships and incentives. Maybe this plan could push people to move to higher tiers and account sharing. I can only think of this as acting as a teaser and getting the foot in the door. Only time will tell. This plan is not meant to have many more subscribers than the other tiers.
"Indian consumer market remains value-conscious" - this is the most important point here. But 200rs per month too seems very expensive. I'm not sure how this will play out. Let's see.<p>Hotstar has been killing it. They have the massive advantage of streaming live sports, especially IPL and other cricket matches.<p>I think Netflix will become the next Apple in India. They gotta think like an Indian company and not as an American company!
Still will be difficult for them to catch up, with Amazon prime working out to be rs85 per month, and hotstar having a massive multilingual catalogue+live sports including most cricket and EPL, Netflix limited catalogue is not exactly value at rs 199.<p>Only they do have some robust infrastructure like Amazon, hotstar service seems somewhat struggling under the load of millions of people watching at prime times.
Since the rise of Reliance Jio, Two things happened:
1. Sales of Budget 4G Phone.
2. Internet Content Consumption on Phone
With that, This is a super-smart move from Netflix to fight Hotstar-like Indian Soap-Opera packed Streaming Services.<p>In fact, Indians were massively watching Netflix already - but using someone else's Account - which is a very common way of saving money. Now this is Rs. 199 is probably going to change that because it's more like a Mobile Plan Recharge.<p>I guess this is the power of introducing a price-plan using Data Science as Netlfix's teams must have found out the importance of Smartphone (Device) and the game Indians were playing.
This should help them somehow. Everyone knows about Netflix but only a few have a monthly paid subscription. Rs 650 is kind of expensive for one service with limited content.<p>I travel in the metro quite regularly, I see 30-50% of passengers consuming some sort of video content on their phones. There is demand for sure. Only time can tell if this new plan really helps Netflix getting more paid subscribers.
Is saying, "the mass consumer market remains value-conscious" just a polite way of saying that Indians don't feel like wasting their hard earned money when pirating is easy?<p>Or is it that regular priced Netflix is a large enough portion of a normal Indian's income that they don't feel like they get enough to watch for their money?<p>Most of the people I know in America basically shrug off the price of Netflix as the cost of a few cups of coffee per month<p>I'm not sure what the right interpretation is, but they kind of lead to different business strategies. The first (easy piracy) is not really Netflix's problem to solve, it's the government's problem. The second (content for money) is either that Netflix needs to invest in more Indian shows or lower their prices even more.
So this was the reason netflix killed its airplay support?<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/6/18298146/netflix-confirms-it-yanked-airplay-support-wont-let-you-beam-shows-to-apple-tvs-anymore" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/6/18298146/netflix-confirms-...</a>
480p streaming which this plan offers will look absolutely pathetic in most Android phones (by this time has 98-99% share in India) which boast ever increasing screen resolutions. So I bet this plan has no takers for people who love beautiful resolutions on their phones which cost sub $300.
Smart move - India has massive mobile data usage, and for many people it's their only form of internet access.<p>Huge, mosly untapped market - it will be interesting to watch their content strategy, will we see Bollywood Netflix originals?
Netflix should work out partnerships with Internet and Telecom Providers to get this working at a massive volume. If Netflix can club their billing, may not be necessary monthly, along with the likes of Jio/Airtel Recharge billings, it will be an easy access to the target subscribers they are looking for.<p>For the majority of Indian masses that this is intended for, it is not just the pricing but the payment method is one of the hurdles.<p>Lot of people still "recharge" their prepaid phone bills with cash.
In some ways Indians are like Americans. They like to be endlessly entertained with movies and sports(mainly cricket though). I think 200 rupees plan could add lot more users. Regarding what this media expert Shah claims about local content, I am not sure what kind of things Netflix can offer that local providers are not already doing in abundance.
The reason these paid services are successful in the US is because we have a fully functional and very threatening legal and corporate system that will find and punish people that steal their content and distribute it. This makes it inconvenient or risky to use free services (about ~13 years ago it was more convenient to pirate, with p2p sharing apps being very popular at US colleges and any music or film a click away, before enforcement ramped up).<p>Does India have the same level of legal enforcement? Why pay for a streaming service if they can pirate content?
Yes considering hotstar which offers english tv serials like GOT, originals and live cricket matches for 999 / yr it's about time Netflix did something similar
Don't understand why the subscription is cheaper on a mobile phone, if the content and resolution is the same. Also, won't you be able to use something like Samsung Dex to watch this content on a tv anyways?
Moves like this really demonstrate the economics of most internet businesses. There is no real tangible link between what people pay and what it nearly costs to offer a service over a stream of bits & bytes.<p>Netflix started at $7.99 in 2010 and today for the same subscription you pay $12.99, which is a 62.5% price hike. That is particularly interesting, because it's considerably more than the inflation over the same period of time, which is at only 17.5% (<a href="https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/</a>).<p>Content got cheaper through Netflix's own productions, engineering optimisations over the last 10 years probably also helped to significantly reduce infrastructure cost for the same service which someone paid $7.99 before and hosting got cheaper as well as Azure and Google Cloud have significantly started to compete with Amazon, yet customers pay A LOT more.<p>Now they want to capture a share of the Indian market and can basically offer a "reduced" service for only a small fraction of the price what a US customer pays, even though nothing changes in terms of what they have to pay their engineers and hosting, etc. in order to sustain the company. Yes there will be a little bit of additional infrastructure cost to also facilitate 480p streaming in India, but I doubt that has anything to do with the actual pricing.<p>I bet Netflix would happily offer HD streaming to Indian customers for the same price if there wasn't a risk of upsetting other paying customers from different countries.<p>Netflix customers will pay arbitrary made up prices always going up and never going down for as long as there is still enough people who just don't care to foot the bill every month. A sense of entitlement to be treated fairly or otherwise walk away, even if that means that you have to spend more time with friends instead of binge watching dumb TV is being lost in this world.