Netflix ditches cheapest ad-free tier

  • 2 months ago
TheStreet’s Conway Gittens brings you the biggest news of the day, including what investors are watching and why Netflix is making a big change.

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Transcript
00:00I'm Conway Gittins reporting from the New York Stock Exchange. Here's what we're watching on the street today.
00:04It was a tense day for the business world as it coped with what is being called the biggest global computer outage in history.
00:12Wall Street also grappled with changing investor sentiment just as earning season shifts into high gear.
00:18Big Tech is on deck in the coming week with Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon releasing quarterly results.
00:24Tesla, Coca-Cola and UPS are some of the other key names to report next week.
00:29The pace of economic growth will also be in focus. Next week we get a read on Second Quarter Gross Domestic Product or GDP.
00:37In other business news, Netflix is nixing its cheapest ad-free streaming plan.
00:43The $11.99 plan is going the way of the DVD.
00:47Instead, customers with the so-called basic plan will have the option to move up to Netflix's standard ad-free plan for $15.49 a month
00:56or its premium plan at $22.99.
00:59There is one other option, however.
01:02Subscribers can switch over to Netflix's ad-supported plan, which costs roughly $7 a month.
01:08This offering is catching on with viewers who may have been forced to get their own accounts after Netflix started cracking down on password sharing.
01:15Sign-ups for the cheap plan, complete with commercials, surged 34 percent during the second quarter.
01:22Meanwhile, total subscriber numbers at nearly 278 million were at an all-time high at the end of June,
01:29far eclipsing rivals Disney+, Peacock and Max.
01:33Netflix added more than 8 million paying users over the April-June period alone,
01:38resulting in better-than-expected quarterly profits.
01:42That'll do it for your daily briefing. From the New York Stock Exchange, I'm Conway Gittens with the Street.
01:51Thanks for watching.

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