Bulletins

Netflix’s $6.99 ad-supported plan goes live on Nov. 3

The streaming service is launching an ad-supported tier in 12 countries next month.

Netflix corporate office

Subscribers of the new plan will have to endure four to five minutes of ads per hour of programming on average.

Photo: Venti Views/Unsplash

Netflix is launching its new ad-supported tier in 12 countries next month: The “basic with ads” plan will become available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the U.K., and the U.S. in the first week of November. U.S. customers will be able to sign up on Nov. 3; the rollout in Spain comes a week later.

Prices for the new plan will vary from country to country, and range from 4.99 euros ($4.88) in Germany to 5.99 euros ($5.86) in France. Subscribers in Mexico will have to pay 99 pesos ($4.95).

Subscribers of the new plan will have to endure four to five minutes of ads per hour of programming on average. Each ad will be 15 or 30 seconds long; Netflix executives said Thursday that the company would not accept any political advertising.

The new plan will include most but not all of Netflix’s catalog at launch. Some movies and TV shows will be unavailable due to licensing restrictions. Netflix COO Greg Peters told journalists Thursday that these holdouts were different from market to market, and that the missing titles accounted anywhere from 5% to 10% of viewing on ad-free plans. “We will continue to work on reducing that number over time,” Peters said.

In addition to its new "basic with ads" plan, Netflix will continue to offer three ad-free tiers, priced $9.99, $15.49, and $19.99. In conjunction with the new plan’s introduction, Netflix is also upping the resolution of both of its basic plans from 480p to 720p. However, anyone who wants to watch Netflix programming in 4K HDR still has to subscribe to the company’s most expensive plan.

Asked whether the new plan could lead to cannibalization, with existing customers downgrading from a more expensive plan, Peters said that the company wasn’t too concerned with the issue. “We want to offer consumers choice,” Peters said, adding that the company modeled the pricing to be “neutral to positive to the comparable [ad-free] plan.”

Note: Protocol is owned by Axel Springer, whose CEO, Mathias Döpfner, is on the board of Netflix.

Correction: A prior version of this article stated that Netflix's ad-supported plan would be missing 5% to 10% of its catalog due to licensing restrictions. The story was updated on Oct. 14, 2022, to reflect that Netflix COO Greg Peters actually said that the missing titles would impact 5% to 10% of overall viewing.

 Janko Roettgers

Janko Roettgers (Twitter, Mastodon) used to be a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.

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