These days, there are no more common bedmates than Netflix and controversy, given the company’s troubles in the stock market and its subsequent, heavily-criticized efforts to overturn its misfortune, such as cracking down on password sharing and pulling funding from some of its content, with animated programming, in particular, taking the biggest hit.
We previously reported that the streaming giant was considering including an ad-supported plan in their services, and it seems that that consideration has been fast-tracked.
According to a report by The New York Times, the company told its employees via a memo that they would be launching an ad-supported subscription plan as early as October this year.
They would be far from the first to include such a plan, with services such as Hulu and HBO Max having had them long before Netflix found themselves in their current pickle. And while introducing an ad-supported plan isn’t quite the worst move the company has made since its financial mishap, it’s hard to gauge the effects that it will have on its viewers, as there’s currently no information surrounding how much less the plan will cost, or where the ads will appear.
What was once a hard stance against including advertisements in their service has transformed into a much softer one, with what they call “consumer choice” at the forefront of this decision. One can’t help but wonder, however, what sort of philosophy drove the original stance against advertisements in the first place, and just how many nuances and circumstances must have changed in order to drive this new approach.
