You still have to watch ads, but potentially fewer of them.
Neflix has been changing its plans and pricing constantly over the past few years. The company introduced an ad-supported plan in 2022, offering a lower monthly price in exchange for some occasional advertising. The company already rolled out 1080p streaming to the plan earlier this year, and now additional improvements are on the way.
Netflix is upgrading its ad-supported plan, which is priced at $6.99 per month, with a couple of improvements. The first, and probably the most important one, is the ability to download content to watch offline. This has long been a staple feature of ad-free Netflix, but it was removed for the ad-supported plan because, well, ads do need to be retrieved with an Internet connection. Now, though, Netflix is letting users download shows and movies. It’s not clear how ads will work with this feature, given what we mentioned before, but we’ll have to wait and see. Netflix might pre-load the ads as part of the download, or it might only connect to the internet when it’s time to show ads. It might also just not show ads, albeit this is unlikely given downloads were disabled in the first place because Netflix had a gripe with that possibility.
The other big addition is the fact that Netflix will reward your binge-watching with fewer ads. Now, all users on the ad-supported tier who binge-watch a show will get every fourth episode of a consecutive binge ad-free. This means that for every three episodes you watch of a show with ads in a row, the fourth will be completely ad-free. With this, Netflix wants to encourage your binge-watching — technically, the more episodes people watch, the more ads Netflix can show and the more money it can make, so by slipping in a courtesy ad-free episode by reaching a specific goal, Netflix is still making a lot of money. So it’s a win-win situation for everyone.
Netflix’s ad-supported tier is $6.99, while the premium tier can go all the way up to $22.99. It’s looking like an increasingly better way to save money on your subscription.
Source: Engadget
