Netflix Confirms £4.99 Ad-Supported Subscription Tier for November

Mike Sanders / 2 years ago

Ever since the start of the year, there have been rumours suggesting that in order to address their alarming drop off in subscriber counts seen since the start of the year, Netflix was considering the introduction of a new less expensive tier which would see it supported, in some way, through the utilisation of adverts.

While this certainly sounded interesting, however, it did clearly beg the question as to whether this would actually happen. Well, following an official update to their website, Netflix has formally confirmed the launch of its new entry-level ‘Basic with ads‘ subscription tier which will formally arrive and be available to purchase next month!

Netflix Launches ‘Basic With Ads’

It has been confirmed that the new ‘Basic With Ads’ tier will officially be released this November and will initially be available to obtain within twelve countries. And just in case it needed to be said, this will be the first time that adverts will be directly utilised on the Netflix platform which, somewhat ironically, first made its name on the premise of the one-off fee with no ads getting in the way of your viewing.

November 1, 2022 (Canada, Mexico)
November 3, 2022 (Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, United Kingdom, United States)
November 10, 2022 (Spain)

In terms of the details, Netflix is still a little coy on exactly how the adverts will be utilised. For example, whether you will have to sit through a block prior to watching your show/series or whether they’ll be periodically spliced within it. – They have, however, confirmed that users can expect to see around 4 adverts over an hour-long period with each advert potentially being up to 30 seconds long. – And no, these will not be skippable.

So, in other words, for every hour of Netflix, you’re going to have (for the moment) a maximum of two minutes of adverts for every 60 minutes of viewing. Which, quite honestly, isn’t that bad.

Basic with Ads VS Basic

The ‘Basic With Ads’ tier will arrive with a £4.99 per month subscription price which, as you can note above, is £2 less expensive than the current ‘basic’ tier which doesn’t include advertisements. – It does, therefore, beg the question as to whether this price is really enough to tempt those back who left the platform due to the rising cost of living (or simply being bored with the programming on offer).

We should additionally note that Netflix has also confirmed that this ‘ad-supported’ tier will not include a certain number of shows due to licensing reasons. Albeit, at the time of writing, they have not gone as far as to cite which shows this will be, but have indicated the overall figure will be around 10% of their total content.