Netflix plans to give users in India access to its service at no charge for a weekend as part of a test to expand its reach in the country, a top company executive said.
The American streaming giant Netflix, which reported slow user growth for the quarter that ended in September, recently stopped offering first-month complimentary access to new users in the U.S. But the company plans to keep experimenting with new ways to lure potential in many parts of the world, said Greg Peters, COO, and Chief Product Officer at Netflix on the company’s earnings call.
One of those new ways is giving away access to Netflix at no charge to customers for a weekend in different markets, he said. The company has picked India, where it competes with Disney, Amazon, and technically three-dozen additional services, as the first market where it will test this idea and “will see how that goes,” from there, he said.
“We think that giving away everyone in a country access to Netflix for free for a weekend could be a great way to expose a bunch of new people to the amazing stories that we have, the service and how it works and hopefully get a bunch of those folks to sign up,” he said, without sharing exactly when the company will roll out this new test in India.
This won’t be the first time Netflix uses India as a testbed to explore new ideas. The company first flirted with the idea of a $2.70 mobile-only monthly plan in New Delhi before introducing it as a permanent tier in the country last year and then nearly a dozen markets. It has since tested even more pricing plans in the country.
