[xfour]

"Netflix is also looking at making its ad tier more attractive to advertisers, including by bolstering its sales teams and ad operations to “meet brands where they need us and how they need us.”

“We’re focused on the long-term revenue potential here,” said (Co-Ceo) Peters. “We’re very optimistic about it. It’s a huge opportunity."

Seems about what everyone was predicting, and inline with making the watching experience worse. It's surprising they added subscribers. I wonder how many were due to deals with Phone providers etc.

[nomel]

Peacock, Amazon Freemium, etc, have proven that people are ok with eyeballs-on-ads as a payment method. If Netflix opens a free/cheaper tier, it won't make it "worse" for existing paid viewers, it'll just make the service more accessible.

We'll have to see if they end up putting ads in the existing paid service tiers.

[CharlesW]

Amazon already did, while simultaneously introducing a new tier for $3 more per month. Next, expect ad-supported plans to show progressively more ads, and the cost of others' ad-free plans to rise.

[nomel]

Amazon is also charging less than half of what Netflix does, for 4k, and is still the cheapest of all the streaming services. I naively assume they're feeling the pressure more than Netflix does.

[CharlesW]

Although there’s a few great series and movies in the catalog, even at half the price it’s not great value. I’d be very surprised if more than 5% of its subscribers only subscribe to Amazon Video, vs. getting it as a freebie with Amazon Prime.

[LegitShady]

Peacock lost billions of dollars in 2023. Amazon Prime Video is a bit weird because amazon can absorb its giant losses, and prior to this last quarter they were absolutely dumping money into productions that didn't make sense, chasing game of thrones by burning money. Netflix, meanwhile was profitable.

Why is the profitable company chasing the business practices of the companies that are burning billions of dollars per year?

[nomel]

> Why is the profitable company chasing the business practices of the companies that are burning billions of dollars per year?

Peacock was an example of how a large group of people prefer ads to paying, which means it wasn't worse for them. This was in the context of my comment of Netflix potentially adding a "free" ad supported tier, which could make the content available to those people who couldn't/wouldn't pay.

But, as you point out, them not being profitable suggests that "free" with ads isn't sustainable, meaning a Netflix "free" tier probably wouldn't work either, assuming they were similar to the 15 minutes/hour of ads that Peacock has.

[folkrav]

Prime literally just started pushing ads to existing customers and charging $3/month extra for no ads. That’s literally making it worse for existing paid viewers. I have no reason to think Netflix would do otherwise. They all end up doing the same crap the second one of them pulls it off, historically…

[ratg13]

As long as there is an affordable option to not have ads, it’s fine to make subsidized tiers for users on a budget.

Although I admit this is typically the slipperiest of slopes.

[e40]

Good point about the mobile providers. Seems this could easily be juking the stats.

[Mindwipe]

Not significantly as most of the growth is outside the US and there are far fewer of those deals overseas (not none, but far less).