Netflix launches Rs 199 ($2.80) mobile-only monthly plan in India
I&#x27;ve said this here before (though some seem to have disliked it). The Netflix UX and video quality are leagues ahead of Amazon Prime Video. Hotstar is a big laggard and far, far behind in every single aspect except for the amount of Indian content it has.<p>India is a highly price sensitive country, with absolutely no customer loyalty in most industry sectors. Nothing can beat free (which is where Hotstar is stuck, competing with YouTube).<p>It will be a tough act for Netflix to make anything from this plan. For this particular price point, restricted to mobile and a single screen at a time, what matters to this audience segment would be more Indian content. Netflix lags on that aspect quite a bit. It has some good Indian language originals, but India is a huge country with 22 official languages (and several hundreds more of unofficial languages), and these originals with a mix of Hindi and English may not appeal to a very wide audience. At the very least, it should voice dub shows in other languages. A better approach would be to use the diverse talent of content creators across languages and states, and provide those with a voice dub in other languages.<p>India as a country produces more than 1000 movies every year. While most are not worth watching (for movie buffs), there are several gems if one looks at all the languages and picks the best among those.<p>Netflix should focus strongly on licensing content produced by others and get recent releases if it wants to keep up in the Indian market. Amazon Prime is very quick in getting recently released Indian language movies on its platform. Hotstar may be similar too.<p>Edit and addendum:<p>Actually, on further thought, this plan doesn&#x27;t make much sense at all by itself. Many people in India share Netflix accounts with friends or family and share the costs too. Such people would be much better off with the highest plan for Rs.800 a month while having five profiles, four simultaneous screens (shared with three other people), flexibility to watch on any device (not just mobile), using 4K quality if desired, etc. Sharing that with three others (four in total) brings the cost to Rs.200 per person, which is just one rupee more than this mobile plan for Rs.199.<p>It&#x27;s going to be even tougher for Netflix to make money through this plan without more partnerships and incentives. Maybe this plan could push people to move to higher tiers and account sharing. I can only think of this as acting as a teaser and getting the foot in the door. Only time will tell. This plan is not meant to have many more subscribers than the other tiers.