Better late than never.
After the incredible success of ‘Sacred Games’, ‘Ghoul’ and prior to that with a movie called ‘Love Per Square Foot’, Netflix Inc has finally revealed its new plan to take on the might of Amazon Prime, Hotstar and Viacom 18's Voot.
The Los Gatos, California-based Netflix has sharpened its focus on the Indian market and is planning to go more local in a deeply multilingual country.
"... it will go from expanding beyond English into Hindi and then into many more languages, more pricing options, more bundling," CEO Reed Hastings said on the third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.Netflix's Sacred Games is so far only available in one version, which uses a mix of English and Hindi.
Rival Amazon, which launched its Indian studios last year, plans for 17 original programs , including shows in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Additional Amazon programming is available in other regional languages like Bengali and Marathi.
Netflix is also looking to redeem itself after missing subscriber estimates in the previous quarter.
The company hooked 7 million new streaming subscribers from July to September and for the current quarter, Netflix forecast it will add 1.8 million customers in the United States and 7.6 million in international markets.
Earlier this year, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings visited India and proclaimed that the “next 100 million subscribers” will be “coming from India.”
Netflix focuses on selling premium subscriptions to a narrow elite segment of Indian society whereas Amazon is reaching out to the burgeoning middle class of India's multilingual society.
"We will experiment with other pricing models not only for India but around the world that allow us to sort of broaden access by providing a pricing tier that sits below our current lowest tier," said Chief Product Officer Greg Peters said on the earnings call.
For now, Netflix said it was 'super encouraged with India' and the growth that they have got early on but the company is aware that it's going to be somewhat of a tough market going ahead right.
"We feel like we have a long, long runway ahead of us in India," said Peters.
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First Published: Oct 17, 2018 11:19 AM IST
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