Starting November 3, Netflix will offer an advertiser-subsidized price category. For the low price of $6.99 a month, you can (maybe) watch episodes of your favorite show, and there may or may not be a 15, 30-second ad. It depends on the view, because some materials will not contain ads due to various restrictions and licensing deals, so some of them will not be in the ad-supported tier.
The streaming industry has been resistant to advertising for a number of reasons, in part because it can be hard to figure out how deals with different movie studios work. Is Netflix (NFLX) Now it has to share a portion of its advertising revenue with Comcast, for example (CMCSA ) About “The Good Place?”
Is it possible that the process of adapting these license agreements to the paid tier is so cumbersome, and the prospect of revenue sharing so unattractive, that the ad-supported version of Netflix will consist only of Netflix original content, and no common library material? If so, is anyone willing to pay for this service? (Besides people who were really meant to get into “The Umbrella Academy”, of course.)
But Netflix won’t be alone in taking this step. Hulu has always had a supported tier that doesn’t have any known content restrictions, as the company supposedly got rid of those wrinkles long ago. Peacock was launched from NBCUniversal in both a free and a paid tier, which includes either few or no ads, depending on the option, and also had access to exclusives like the third and fourth seasons of the cult comedy “AP Bio,” which were It’s not available with the free option.
Both Disney + (dis) The HBO Max (WBD) Supported ad levels will be launched soon. Will they also have similar restrictions? Disney doesn’t have a lot of services that they haven’t produced in-house, and while HBO Max’s library of content is largely filled with material from the Warner Bros. collection. Discovery, however, it also contains non-Warner films. But will it be inaccessible through the paid tier? We just have to see.
TheStreet broke down why this is happening, and what it says about the broadcast industry at the moment. Was the move toward an ad-supported model inevitable, or could it have been avoided if it offered better offers?
But what does everyone think? Well, if Twitter is anything to say, people have a lot of ideas about this development. and jokes. They also have a lot of jokes.
It doesn’t matter to anyone that the Netflix brand is devalued – Netflix doesn’t present itself as a high-profile cultural product as HBO once did. Basically people think it’s just a silly move that seems a bit hopeless, proof that the streaming revolution is now just plain old TV, and the days of paying for so many premium channels to watch everything are back now, and it’s more entrenched than ever.
Or, as Dave Itzkopf, a New York Times columnist known to be one of the savviest on social media, put it, it appears to be a move by a CEO who doesn’t really understand what their product is supposed to be.
Overall, this is a big moment for people who like to remind you to hold on to your physical media.
