In December, the platform lowered its India pricing for the first time, with the entry-level subscription now costing Rs 199 per month.
In India, Netflix hasn’t found as many takers as it would like. Netflix appears to have faced competition from India’s cable television network since its arrival into the nation in 2016.
In December, the platform lowered its India pricing for the first time, with the entry-level subscription now available for Rs 199 per month, down from Rs 499 per month previously.
According to a Moneycontrol storey, Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings admitted during an earnings conference call on January 20 that India has been a tough business to crack: “We’ve got the flywheel turning in every other significant market.” What irritates us is why we haven’t had the same success in India. “However, we’re obviously leaning in.”
“What is distinctive about India is cable,” he continued. It costs roughly $3 (Rs 223) per month per household, which is significantly less than the rest of the globe and has an impact on customer expectations.”
According to Netflix COO Greg Peters, it was the right time to decrease prices in India. “We also wanted to do it across the range of plans that we had under the theory that some of those features like the ability to watch on TV with a basic plan really unlocks more value in the service and therefore, would create more retention, more attractiveness. While we decrease ARM, (average revenue per member) as a result of the price decreases, we’re going to make it up in more subscriber adds (additions),” he reportedly said, adding that “some of these effects, like retention, take a couple of months to get a very clean read on it”.
Asia, according to Moneycontrol, is the company’s smallest region, after North America, Latin America, and Europe. The 32.6 million subscribers in the region make up 14.7% of the service’s total 221.84 million users.
According to a recent forecast by Media Partners Asia, an independent research and consulting group, the service’s subscriber base will reach 5.5 million by the end of 2021. Netflix has only 5% of total streaming service customers in India, but it has a 29 percent share of subscription video-on-demand revenue, according to the corporation.
Netflix added 8.3 million new members in the fourth quarter, bringing the total number of new members to 18.2 million in 2021, down 50% from the record 37 million added in 2020.