NETFLIX NEXT
Small is beautiful. That is one of the dominant truths in product positioning in India. From shampoo sachets at ₹1 in the 1980s to pocket-friendly sachets of practically every consumable over the years, to the more modern cryptocurrency investments starting at just ₹100, bite-sized products and services have powerful spend value in this country with relatively low per capita income. So, when global streaming giant Netflix introduced a bite-sized plan in July 2019—a mobile-only plan for ₹199 a month—three years into its India entry, experts and consumers alike nodded their heads in delighted approval.
“The reception [to the ₹199 plan] was amazing,” says Abhishek Nag, Director, Business Development, Netflix India, over a Zoom call, his casual, maroon round-neck tee reflecting the informality of the company’s work ethos. Nag points out that this subscription-plan-tied-to-a-device was a global first, compared to its usual plans based on streaming quality and the number of concurrent streams. The mobile-only plan was subsequently rolled out in countries such as Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. Recently, the plan was rolled out to 78 new countries in Asia and Africa.
A large part of the credit for the bite-sized plan goes to the ubiquitous mobile phone. In its very first year, Netflix allowed content to be downloaded on mobile devices, akin to some of its rivals. “In India, we saw the preference for people to download content on the device, which is watched on the commute back home [from work], completely uninterrupted,” explains Nag. That led to long conversations with consumers, visiting their homes, trying to see how Netflix might be on the mobile, before the full-fledged launch of the ₹199 plan.
The other part of the credit goes to competition and India’s market dynamics. When Netflix launched in India in early 2016, its basic subscription plan was priced at an astronomical ₹500 a month (yes, that’s ₹6,000 a year). By end-2016, rival Amazon Prime Video rolled out its service in India; it was available as part of the Amazon Prime subscription at a price of ₹499 for a year. It also included free deliveries and other services. Competition aside, there was another challenge. A large chunk of the market was (and still is) driven by advertising-fuelled free viewing, which makes it difficult for a subscription-based product, premium or otherwise, to be mass-adopted (today more than 300 million subscribers—duplicated—watch video content free of cost). Faced with
