[wtmt]

I've said this here before (though some seem to have disliked it). The Netflix UX and video quality are leagues ahead of Amazon Prime Video. Hotstar is a big laggard and far, far behind in every single aspect except for the amount of Indian content it has.

India is a highly price sensitive country, with absolutely no customer loyalty in most industry sectors. Nothing can beat free (which is where Hotstar is stuck, competing with YouTube).

It will be a tough act for Netflix to make anything from this plan. For this particular price point, restricted to mobile and a single screen at a time, what matters to this audience segment would be more Indian content. Netflix lags on that aspect quite a bit. It has some good Indian language originals, but India is a huge country with 22 official languages (and several hundreds more of unofficial languages), and these originals with a mix of Hindi and English may not appeal to a very wide audience. At the very least, it should voice dub shows in other languages. A better approach would be to use the diverse talent of content creators across languages and states, and provide those with a voice dub in other languages.

India as a country produces more than 1000 movies every year. While most are not worth watching (for movie buffs), there are several gems if one looks at all the languages and picks the best among those.

Netflix should focus strongly on licensing content produced by others and get recent releases if it wants to keep up in the Indian market. Amazon Prime is very quick in getting recently released Indian language movies on its platform. Hotstar may be similar too.

Edit and addendum:

Actually, on further thought, this plan doesn't make much sense at all by itself. Many people in India share Netflix accounts with friends or family and share the costs too. Such people would be much better off with the highest plan for Rs.800 a month while having five profiles, four simultaneous screens (shared with three other people), flexibility to watch on any device (not just mobile), using 4K quality if desired, etc. Sharing that with three others (four in total) brings the cost to Rs.200 per person, which is just one rupee more than this mobile plan for Rs.199.

It's going to be even tougher for Netflix to make money through this plan without more partnerships and incentives. Maybe this plan could push people to move to higher tiers and account sharing. I can only think of this as acting as a teaser and getting the foot in the door. Only time will tell. This plan is not meant to have many more subscribers than the other tiers.

[cptskippy]

> The Netflix UX and video quality are leagues ahead of Amazon Prime Video.

The UX for both are bad in different ways. Amazon's wastes a lot of space but Netflix autoplay trailers annoys me to no end.

Perhaps the quality varies at lower resolutions but, at 1080 and 4K, I haven't noticed a difference.

[totaldude87]

>> Netflix autoplay trailers annoys me to no end

THIS.. i had to rant about this with 100 words :) https://medium.com/@totaldude87/netflix-please-stop-autoplay...

[fizgig]

I rant every time this comes up. I've cancelled solely because of this annoying feature. The Amazon Video app on my Roku may not be as slick, but at least it doesn't force me to mute my TV when I'm browsing through the selections.

[darkpuma]

I bet they A/B tested that feature and decided users loved it because their metrics did not reveal how many users were muting their televisions. Maybe on Smart TVs they know, but perhaps not if that smart TV is hooked up to an external sound system.

[dmitriid]

They were also looking at “engagement metrics” most likely.

“Look, users browse twice as much and engage with content” which in reality is “users scroll past as fast as they can or try to press pause”

[darkpuma]

Let me preface this by admitting that I'm a very poor judge of video quality since I generally think those 720p/700MB torrent encodes are swell. So I'm going to ignore the matter of video quality; by my awful standards they're both perfectly adequate.

I think Amazon has Netflix beat on UX. To search Netflix without using third party tools is a real nightmare. The user interface seems user-hostile, like it's designed to conceal from the user the true breadth of Netflix's library (I earnestly believe it was.) It wasn't always this bad, in the early days of netflix's streaming business the search wasn't bad, and back when they were a DVD service (which is when I first subscribed) the search functionality was pretty decent even.

But with Amazon video, you've got the search features built into the amazon prime apps, which admittedly usually sucks, but you've also got the option of searching on amazon.com itself, or on IMDB (which has been owned by Amazon since the late 90s.) Searching on IMDB is what I do. When doing advanced searches you can specify that you're only interested in movies that are free on amazon prime in your region.

E.g.: Feature Action movies that are free on Amazon Prime in the US, and are in the IMDB Top 1000: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&genres...

(Perhaps IMDB advanced search for prime videos is bad UX for casual users (although it was my non-technical mother who brought my attention to it, so I'd push back against that notion) but at the very least it's an option. While I've seen third party websites offering a good proper advanced search of Netflix's catalogue, as far as I know if you stick to Netflix operated search interfaces you're basically stuck up shit creek.)

[wtmt]

GP here. I do agree with some of your points. I usually watch content on a TV, and very rarely on a computer or mobile device. On the TV, it's nice to have IMDB ratings that show up on some/many (not all) of the content on Amazon Prime Video. With Netflix I have to look it up separately. Maybe Netflix doesn't like IMDB because that's owned by Amazon, but it could provide Rotten Tomatoes ratings instead, and I'd be happy.

When I do watch things on the TV from a distance, it's important for the content preview images to be large enough and the spacing between rows of content preview images appropriate (fonts and font sizes also matter). On both Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar, I find the preview images and the layout to be cluttered and much smaller than expected. Reading content titles is quite difficult. It gets worse because both Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar have a lot more Indian content, but they tend to display the title transliterated in English while the poster has the title in the original language (which is small). This makes it difficult to read the text in the Indian language's script (transliterated titles can only help to some extent).

Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar also seem to load information on opened shows/movies slower compared to Netflix. I have a fast connection (40Mbps) with almost nothing else going on most of the time. So Netflix is doing something better in these areas.

Of course, like others have mentioned, I hate the Netflix auto-playing trailers for the currently selected show or movie. That's certainly very annoying and a ding on the Netflix UX.

[ajford]

My biggest complaint about Prime video is the absolutely horrid navigation of TV series.

If I'm browsing a particular genre, say Sci-Fi for example, I'm shown every season of each show, with it's own cover art. This serves to make their selection of shows seem more expansive than it is, which might be the purpose.

And given that they have a fair number of long running series licensed, this means browsing through dozens of the same shows.

I'll qualify all this by saying my experience is limited to the Fire TV interface, as I rarely watch streaming on my PC, but if the interface is that tedious on their own branded experience, I can't imagine the web interface is much better, though I could be way off the mark.

[edgarvaldes]

>those 720p/700MB torrent encodes

Are those still produced for recent movies?

[darkpuma]

Sometimes, but it's becoming less and less common.

[ctvo]

> The Netflix UX and video quality are leagues ahead of Amazon Prime Video.

Source please, especially on video quality.

[wtmt]

Similar to what cbsks said, Amazon Prime Video usually starts with low quality fuzzy video, which I've also seen happen in between while watching something. On Netflix, the video quality has been great from start to finish almost all the time. There have been only a few instances where I have seen fuzzy videos on it for a few seconds. This is over broadband that's usually at 40Mbps or so, which is way more than what these streaming services need for even 1080p quality videos.

[cbsks]

On my Android TV, every Amazon videos starts at low quality before jumping to high res after a minute or so. This happens every time I start the app. Netflix never has that issue for me.

That minor annoyance is nothing compared to Netflix's auto-playing trailers, however. I actively avoid opening Netflix unless I already know what I am going to watch, and I close it immediately after I'm done watching it.

[alienreborn]

Hotstar movie/tv content and UI sucks ass but they have live cricket along with few other popular sports leagues which gives them a huge advantage in Indian market.

[kalesh]

Yeah, I do feel the same. We are a country wherein 90's we used to steal cable tv subscription by hijacking antennas. I have done it myself. I see so many people (while travelling in metro) viewing horrible cam rips of latest movies. Majority still don't care about quality. Free always beats quality here.

[kamaal]

>>Nothing can beat free (which is where Hotstar is stuck, competing with YouTube).

As you yourself mentioned cheap beats expensive in India. And because of the latest TRAI rules of selling TV channels in packages, cable TV has just become prohibitively expensive. Earlier you could get all the channels for 500 rupees, you get nothing for that today.

Which is a big reason Netflix like streaming services will win big in the coming future.

>>For this particular price point, restricted to mobile and a single screen at a time, what matters to this audience segment would be more Indian content.

Anybody buying this plans has a smart phone that can cast to a TV. So its not exactly mobile only. Plus if you have one account it works for the whole family.

[ar_lan]

UX does not matter much if there's not good enough content.

[ge96]

> While most are not worth watching

I don’t know man https://youtu.be/q8vr0jVHU8Q?t=205

[rammy1234]

this is more of exactly what happens where price plays absolutely everything. Take Jio mobile service, introduced cheap pricing , got every indian to start using them and got everyone high speed internet.