Well, well, well. If it isn’t our old pal, speculation.
According to The Wrap, Netflix is considering moving up the timeline on charging subscribers less money in exchange for watching advertisements. If the rumor is true, we could see ads on the streamer as soon as November.
“We are still in the early days of deciding how to launch a lower priced, ad-supported tier and no decisions have been made. So this is all just speculation at this point,” said one Netflix spokesperson.
Putting away the pitchfork for a moment, there are some obvious positives and negatives here. On the plus side, Netflix is intent on capping the amount of money they take from any one company so we don’t see the same ads over and over and over, and the current plan is to have about 4 minutes of advertising per hour of series time. Movies would also get a brief pre-roll of ads. That’s really not so bad in the grand scheme of things, considering that you’ll be paying less out of pocket for access to your Stranger Things and your Squid Game. The final plus side is that you can avoid the ads by paying what you’re already paying. For now.
On the negative side, there are going to be ads on Netflix. Granted, the same goes for Disney+, which will also roll out ad-supported tiers fairly soon. After years of disrupting, we’ve finally come full circle to reinventing cable TV. Great work, everyone.
(via The Wrap)