Netflix India Drops Prices after Continued Subscriber Crunch

On Tuesday, Netflix India dropped subscription prices after it continues to struggle to find subscribers, for the second time in six years since its launch. Incidentally, these price cuts come at a time when Netflix has increased monthly tariffs across the world.

Netflix India Reduced Prices

Interestingly, Netflix India offers the cheapest version of Netflix in the world. The latest slashes in the prices mean that Netflix India has cost by at least 18% and up to 60.1%. Interestingly, the subscription service had lowered its prices in 2019 as well, to attract more customers. Back then, Netflix launched a “mobile-only” tier in India that was priced at ₹199/month, a first in the world.

The latest prices are as follows.

• Netflix Mobile: The plan, which used to cost ₹199/month, now costs ₹149/month. This plan allows only one user account, and can only be used on a mobile.
• Netflix Basic: This plan now costs ₹199/month in India, down from ₹499/month. The Netflix Basic plan, which permits streaming on any device. However, Netflix doesn't allow resolutions higher than 480p on this plan.
• Netflix Standard: The most popular plan, which used to cost ₹649/month, now costs ₹499/month. This plan improves the video resolution to HD (720p) and allows two users to stream at the same time.
• Netflix Premium: The most expensive plan now costs ₹649/month, down from ₹799/month. Notably, Netflix Premium offers four streams at the same time and streams in 4K.

Notably, Netflix remains aware of the fact that India is one of the world's largest consumers of OTT content. However, it has failed to generate enough value even though it has invested almost a billion dollars in the country. Recent estimates suggest that Netflix India will have 89 million paying users by the end of 2021, up from 57 million in 2020.

However, Amazon Prime and Disney+Hotstar have had little issues in generating customers, thanks largely to their affordable pricing. Especially Disney+Hotstar, which has dominated the OTT market in India, thanks to a much larger ad-supported local content library. What's more, it has syndication deals with multiple international media houses such as HBO. Furthermore, it has almost all sports streaming rights, including English Premier League and IPL. Only YouTube poses any sort of challenge to Disney+Hotstar, as the former has about 225 million users in India.