Today, Netflix has announced that it will be launching a new, less expensive tier of its subscription service which is supported by advertisements.
As previously reported, the new tier lines up with a lot of what the current Basic tier offers, and the ads that will be included with it averages out at 4 to 5 minutes per hour of viewing. There will also be some TV shows and movies that won"t be available due to licensing restrictions and no ability to download titles.
To begin with, the new Basic with Ads tier will be launching on November 3rd at 9am PT in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, the UK and the US, and will start from $6.99 a month.
Netflix does go into some details on the adverts as well to try and entice advertisers to promote on the platform, and it does say that at launch, ads will be 15 or 30 seconds in length, which will play before and during shows and films.
A key difference for the new plan, which will also be applied to the existing Basic plan, is that footage will be capped at 720p/HD resolution, which is the only change listed to the existing plan, however Netflix states that current plans and members will not be impacted.