Netflix’s Ad Tier Revealed, Isn’t Too Great
Seems every streamer needs a cheaper subscription plan with ads these days, and the OG held out in resistance as long as it could, but Netflix is finally caving. They originally planned to roll out their ad-supported tier sometime next year, but….they’re skipping ahead. Netflix with ads will be available as soon as next month.
As it stands, the cheapest Netflix plan is $9.99 a month. This one reduces the price to $6.99 but throws in a few inconveniences to make sure you’re not too happy. The most obvious of these are the ads, which will appear at a rate of 4 to 5 minutes per hour, on average. And the ads will appear not just before and after the episodes, but during, most assuredly at awkward nonsensical times as much of Netflix’s original library wasn’t designed around ad breaks. As a hypothetical example, Dustin will say “OH SH–” followed by three commercials for insurance companies, then back to Dustin going “–IT!”
The most bizarre setback is the fine print that says “five to 10 percent of the Netflix library will be unavailable.” Netflix says this has more to do with licensing restrictions than their arbitrarily holding content back, and that they’re working on opening things up 100%. Also, the resolution is capped at 720p. For some weird reason Netflix’s cheapest ad-free tier is still 480p, but given that the HD one costs twice that, I make do.
But hey…it could have been worse. Just look at what Disney+ is doing — hiking the ad-free rate for their own service by three bucks on the day their ad tier launches. We haven’t heard of any such sinister plan from Netflix.
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