Netflix, the basic plan with advertising arrives in Italy: prices and timing

Netflix’s “basic plan with advertising” arrives in Italy on November 3 at 5:00 pm: it will cost € 5.49, the US company announced. The company says that like the basic ad-free plan, video quality will be limited to HD 720p. You will not be able to download any content for offline viewing, and a small number of content may not be available due to licensing issues, at least at this early stage.

Netflix says there will be about 4-5 minutes of advertising on average for every hour of content watched. The commercials will last between 15 and 30 seconds and will be displayed before and during movies or episodes of a series. Recall that in the past it was confirmed that Microsoft is the technical partner of the initiative. Netflix explains that advertisers will have ample opportunities for targeting based on the genre of the content and the country of application, and that they will be able to “prevent their advertisements from appearing on content that may be inconsistent with their brand (for example, sex, nudity or images. violent).

In this initial phase, the Basic plan with advertising will be available in 12 countries in all: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Korea, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Mexico, United Kingdom, Spain and United States. Of course, prices vary by market. “Based on what we will learn from this experience, we plan to extend the offering to other countries,” the company said.

All the rest: The plans we already know, namely Basic, Standard and Premium, continue to work exactly as they always have, under the same conditions and at the same prices. The catalog is (almost) the same, the app as well, and there are no restrictions or limitations of the functionality other than what we have already said previously regarding the download of contents for offline viewing.

In short, why the company’s growth has slowed significantly in recent months – in fact it even stopped altogether a couple of quarters ago, when Netflix recorded its first drop in subscribers in its history (at least since it started streaming; maybe not everyone knows when it started it allowed to rent DVDs by mail ). The company has implemented several containment measures – including some staff cuts, cost rationalization, and a crackdown on password sharing outside the household. It is worth mentioning that CEO and founder Reed Hastings has always been extremely refractory to introducing advertising into his service.