Netflix mulls cheaper prices to chase Indian viewers

Netflix believes that India has hundreds of millions of potential video customers, and the company will explore a lower-priced plan to reel them in.

“We’ll experiment with other pricing models not only for India, but around the world that allow us to sort of broaden access by providing a pricing tier that sits below our current lowest tier,” Netflix chief product officer Gregory Peters said on a conference call with analysts late Tuesday after the company reported third-quarter earnings.

The company may also add shows for India in languages other than English and Hindi, chief executive officer Reed Hastings said on the call.

He cited hundreds of millions of mobile phone subscribers in the country as potential customers.

“We’ll take it one million at a time and figure out how to expand the market as we grow,” Hastings said.

On the call, Hastings declined to provide exact details on the company’s India growth.

The rise of online entertainment in India has paralleled the growth of high-speed internet in the country. More than 150 million people in the country have high-speed internet access, often through their phones.

Revenue from “over-the-top” video services like YouTube, Netflix and others reached 20.2 billion rupees in 2017, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report.

After a stumble with its previous results, Netflix announced on Tuesday it added far more subscribers than analysts expected in the third quarter. The world’s largest paid online TV network also issued an upbeat outlook for the current three months, saying it plans to add 28.9 million customers in total this year, a record for the 21-year-old company.

The shares jumped as much as 9.7 per cent Wednesday in New York trading.

The results should prolong Netflix’s reign as one of the best-performing stocks on Wall Street, giving the company leeway to spend billions of dollars more on original programming.