U.S. Netflix users, today is the day. The streaming giant went live with its newest price tier, offering subscribers a cheaper price in exchange for ads and restricted viewing options.
With the company raising prices for its upper tiers, dropping your subscription fee to $6.99/month could be tempting, but there’s a few catches. For one, your picture quality will be at 720p, which is a sizable dip compared to the 4k tied to the Premium service. Besides agreeing to ads, your viewing options will be limited as well. If you read the fine print on Netflix’s price tier page, it’s laid out for you. “Basic with ads has a limited number of movies and TV shows unavailable due to licensing restrictions. Some location and device restrictions also apply.”
Just below that tidbit, the footnotes also advised that you’ll be required to give your date of birth to better personalize the advertisements, which won’t come as welcome news for everyone making the switch. In fact, some Twitter users were already expressing their frustrations.
Much of Netflix’s changes are in response to what’s been a dismal financial year. The corporation made headlines after it experienced the largest drop in subscribers it had ever seen in the second quarter of 2022. That inspired the company’s executives to hit the panic button and begin slashing the budget. The results were a sweeping round of cancellations for many of its original productions.
The more controversial move was aimed to curtail account and password sharing. Earlier this year, Netflix announced plans to charge an additional fee for multiple users logging into the same account from different locations. As expected, the news was received poorly. Add that to the price increase for the $19.99 Premium plan, and it’s looking like a risky gamble on Netflix’s part.