You know a company messed up when they start offering deals that seem too good to be true. Sears selling products for 70% off? They're just clearing out that store. Equifax offered free credit monitoring? Uh oh.
Random deals and sales are the most suspicious events a company can hold. Either they leaked all of your data, or they made a bad business decision. This week, that company is Netflix, and fortunately, they didn't leak all of our data.
But oh did they make a bad business decision. Just awful.
Raised Prices, Dropped Stocks
This past April, Netflix raised prices yet again. Now, it's not a complicated thing to believe that customers don't like paying more for the same. However, this is what Netflix has been doing for the past few years. Netflix finally got that hint when their quarterly growth was only half of their expected,
Hint: no one likes it. Not even the employees, probably.
growing by 2.7 million customers globally.
2.7 million is a lot of customers, but from a business perspective, you have to be a pessimist. They didn't gain 2.7 million because they never got the other 2.7 million.
The reduction in growth isn't only because of the raised prices, though that is a massive part of it. The other reason is that Netflix is finally experiencing fierce competition, with Disney+ being cheap and offering tons of Marvel and Disney content with their Service at launch.
Between the lack of growth and experiencing a feeling of competition, the people over at Netflix have been watching the stocks drop over the past week. However, Netflix has an idea that will help their sales. Well, at least they hope so.
Cheap Service = More Subscribers
This week, Netflix has launched the first instance of its mobile-only Service. This mobile-only plan costs $3/mo, coming in much cheaper than Netflix's Basic plan. Well, there is one more caveat to the plan: But I digress. Netflix is taking a step in the right direction, if not a very small step. A baby step, if you will. I mean, a $3/mo plan is one that makes you think it's too good to be true, like a heavily
Of course, there are a couple of caveats of the mobile-only plan. One is the same as HBO Now's, being that it only works on mobile devices. If you plan on watching Netflix on your TV, you'll have to crack open your wallet.
The only other caveat is that streaming is limited to 480p. At least you'll finally be able to count the pixels of the movie. 480p, and it'll still look better than that one episode of Game of Thrones.
Yep. Netflix's most significant chance of redemption is only available in one country. Their saving grace can't be found anywhere else, no matter how much we want it. it's only available in India.
Not to say that the $3 plan won't be coming to any other country, it's just that Netflix decided to test the Service by releasing it in only one country. However, their choosing India isn't surprising, as they are Netflix's largest mobile-streaming market.
Netflix has not cemented the possibility of the plan coming to other countries, but they have to. If this plan were available in every other country-and allowed HD streaming-they wouldn't need any more subscribers, they'd have hundreds of thousands from the $3 plan alone.
If Netflix wants to get on everyone's right side after the price hike, all they need to do is make this plan available everywhere. I'm sure people will forget all about the price hike if they have a cheap alternative.
That's all a dream, but I think I'm allowed to dream. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pay an extra $2 for my Netflix subscription.
discounted VPN. Wow, that sounds so entitled now that I typed it out.
