So Netflix finally put a number on the ad tier yesterday. $6.99 a month, launching November 3rd here in the US (and ten other countries at the same time, which is a bigger simultaneous rollout than I expected from them). I'd been half-dreading this announcement for weeks because the rumors kept getting worse, and yeah, the actual details didn't really improve my mood.
Here's the thing nobody's ad-tier hot take seems to be leading with: it caps out at 720p. Not 1080p. Not "slightly reduced but still fine." Seven hundred and twenty vertical pixels, on whatever TV you bought in the last five years that's almost certainly 4K native. I have a 55 inch set in the living room and 720p on that thing is going to look like a Skype call from 2011. My in-laws are exactly the kind of household Netflix is targeting with this tier too, price-sensitive, fine with commercials, don't care about prestige TV cinematography, and even they're going to notice their picture suddenly looks soft.
No downloads either, which matters more than people give it credit for. Half the reason I still pay for Netflix instead of just pirating garbage off some sketchy site is that I can download three episodes of something before a flight and not think about it again. Take that away and the whole value proposition gets a lot shakier for anyone who travels or has a spotty connection.
And then there's the licensing gap. Some studios apparently haven't signed off on their content appearing in an ad-supported context, so a chunk of the catalog just won't be there on the cheap tier. Nobody's saying exactly how much yet. Knowing how these negotiations tend to go, I'd bet it's more than Netflix wants to admit right now and less than it'll end up being in six months once more studios realize they can extract better terms.
Four to five minutes of ads per hour is the number being floated, which honestly isn't as bad as I feared, it's less than a typical basic-cable hour by a wide margin. I remember watching stuff on regular TV as a kid and the ad breaks felt endless. This is closer to a light dusting than the assault I was bracing for. Small mercy.
What actually bugs me is less about the tier itself and more about what it signals. For a decade the pitch was: pay us and you never see an ad again, that's the whole deal, that's what separates streaming from cable. Now the ad-free premise gets treated as a premium feature you have to opt into rather than the baseline. Once one major player does this and it works even a little, everybody else follows within a year or two. I'd put money on it. Hulu's had ads forever obviously, but Hulu never got to pretend otherwise the way Netflix did.
Small tangent, but this is also happening at the same time Netflix has been quietly testing password-sharing crackdowns in a few countries. Different problem, same underlying story really: the easy-money-no-consequences era of streaming is winding down and they're trying out every lever at once to see what sticks without losing subscribers. I don't think this is some grand villain-twirling plan on their part so much as a company that grew for a decade assuming infinite subscriber growth and is now discovering that assumption was wrong.
I'll probably stick with my current ad-free plan for now, mostly out of laziness more than principle, but I get why $6.99 is tempting for a second household account or the kids' profile nobody's watching in 4K anyway. If you've got an older TV or you mostly watch on a phone during your commute, the resolution cap barely registers and this might genuinely be a good deal. If you just dropped $1500 on a new OLED, less so.
Curious to see the actual picture quality once this launches next month. I might sign up on a burner account just to see how bad it really looks compared to what I'm used to.