Report: Netflix Experiments with New Pricing Tier in Asia
(Netflix)(November 16, 2018) The fight for streaming dollars and users' eyes is a global battle. A recent story released by nScreenMedia says that Netflix is “quietly” exploring a new pricing tier in the Malaysian market. While the SVOD provider services some 130 million subscribers world-wide, the Asian market only accounts for roughly 5% of its total user base.
The new pricing tier allows for access to standard definition video quality and can only be viewed on a smartphone or portable device. Priced at $4 per month, the new fee is nearly half of Netflix’s previous low-end option. nScreenMedia implies that this kind of pricing tier is necessary to be competitive in less affluent areas of the world, especially since lower priced options have been available for several years. And while the door remains open for Netflix to deploy a similar pricing strategy in larger, more well established, regions of service, there is some speculation that Netflix may actually be moving toward rate increases to help offset original content production costs.
Netflix is said to be investing nearly $13 billion this year in region-specific original content. According to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, the company is launching 17 new original shows in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and India, rounding out an estimated 100 new and original shows planned for distribution across eight Asian countries through 2019.
“Asia is home to the world's great creative centers producing some of the most compelling films and series of today,” said Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer for Netflix. “The beauty of Netflix is that we can take never-seen before stories from South Korea, Thailand, Japan, India, Taiwan or elsewhere, and easily connect them to people all over Asia and the world. More than half of Asian content hours viewed on Netflix this year are viewed outside the region, so we have confidence that our upcoming slate of Asian productions will find fans in their home countries and abroad.”
The stakes are high for Netflix as it looks to find new customers. According Bloomberg, the company could gain as many as 100 million new customers in India alone.
