Moves like this really demonstrate the economics of most internet businesses. There is no real tangible link between what people pay and what it nearly costs to offer a service over a stream of bits & bytes.
Netflix started at $7.99 in 2010 and today for the same subscription you pay $12.99, which is a 62.5% price hike. That is particularly interesting, because it's considerably more than the inflation over the same period of time, which is at only 17.5% (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/).
Content got cheaper through Netflix's own productions, engineering optimisations over the last 10 years probably also helped to significantly reduce infrastructure cost for the same service which someone paid $7.99 before and hosting got cheaper as well as Azure and Google Cloud have significantly started to compete with Amazon, yet customers pay A LOT more.
Now they want to capture a share of the Indian market and can basically offer a "reduced" service for only a small fraction of the price what a US customer pays, even though nothing changes in terms of what they have to pay their engineers and hosting, etc. in order to sustain the company. Yes there will be a little bit of additional infrastructure cost to also facilitate 480p streaming in India, but I doubt that has anything to do with the actual pricing.
I bet Netflix would happily offer HD streaming to Indian customers for the same price if there wasn't a risk of upsetting other paying customers from different countries.
Netflix customers will pay arbitrary made up prices always going up and never going down for as long as there is still enough people who just don't care to foot the bill every month. A sense of entitlement to be treated fairly or otherwise walk away, even if that means that you have to spend more time with friends instead of binge watching dumb TV is being lost in this world.
Citation needed. Everything I've heard is that content is getting more expensive for them because there are more streaming services competing for content.
Netflix started at $7.99 in 2010 and today for the same subscription you pay $12.99, which is a 62.5% price hike. That is particularly interesting, because it's considerably more than the inflation over the same period of time, which is at only 17.5% (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/).
Content got cheaper through Netflix's own productions, engineering optimisations over the last 10 years probably also helped to significantly reduce infrastructure cost for the same service which someone paid $7.99 before and hosting got cheaper as well as Azure and Google Cloud have significantly started to compete with Amazon, yet customers pay A LOT more.
Now they want to capture a share of the Indian market and can basically offer a "reduced" service for only a small fraction of the price what a US customer pays, even though nothing changes in terms of what they have to pay their engineers and hosting, etc. in order to sustain the company. Yes there will be a little bit of additional infrastructure cost to also facilitate 480p streaming in India, but I doubt that has anything to do with the actual pricing.
I bet Netflix would happily offer HD streaming to Indian customers for the same price if there wasn't a risk of upsetting other paying customers from different countries.
Netflix customers will pay arbitrary made up prices always going up and never going down for as long as there is still enough people who just don't care to foot the bill every month. A sense of entitlement to be treated fairly or otherwise walk away, even if that means that you have to spend more time with friends instead of binge watching dumb TV is being lost in this world.