Netflix plans to offer a free trial of its full service to everyone in a country for a weekend, starting its experiment giving free access to users in India for a weekend as part of its strategy to expand its reach globally.
Netflix Chief Product Officer Greg Peters revealed about the StreamFest — to offer its services for free for 48 hours in India in a bid to boost subscriptions — during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday. However, no details were announced about the timing or other features of the offer.
Earlier this year, Netflix stopped its 30-day free trial promotion offer in India and recently extended it to all markets to let new users test its service and watch a few Web series before working for its subscription. The company has been conducting various “A/B” tests of a wide range of product features, and multiple pricing experiments in India and other countries over the past few years, in a bid to broaden its user base while retaining its premium offering.
In terms of promotions, it has a wide range of several initiatives in different parts of the world. This helps the global streaming giant to understand various requirements of viewers and make appropriate updates.
The promotional offers are the need of the hour for Netflix in order to cope and withstand against peer streaming platforms like Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ Hotstar as well as to expand its subscriber base that hasn’t grown as per expected. Even though it hit the mark of over 19.5 crore subscribers, including Asia Pacific region accounting to 46 per cent by September 30, this was up from 19.29 crores subscribers reported as of June 30.
However, the company predicted to include additional 25 lakh new subscribers in the third quarter. It had to face a three lakhs less subscribers than the actual added subscriptions during the period.
As COVID-19 kicked in, the company made a selection of documentary films and series available free via YouTube as an initiative to help school teachers.
