On November 3, Netflix launched its cheapest subscription tier to date, with the caveat being that it is ad-supported. The basic with ads tier costs $7 a month in the United States, and Netflix has plenty of content available to watch–although there are more than 250 movies and TV shows locked to people in this tier. When it comes to the ads themselves, we know what Netflix has told us about the experience, but what is basic with ads actually like to watch?
Digging into the new plan, we found out some interesting things about the basic with ads plan. Keep in mind, nothing we found in the two days we messed around with this tier was all that shocking. Netflix’s tier was pretty straightforward with no major surprises for the average person watching the streaming service. Still, there is one aspect of the new tier that’s a bit unexpected, which we’ll get to.
Ad length:
According to Netflx, you should be getting around 4 minutes of ads per hour, but that can vary by title. Obviously, ads cannot be skipped. Watching an episode of the recently-released Netflix original Blockbuster, the first episode–with a runtime of around 30 minutes–had 2 minutes and 15 seconds of ads. The second episode had 2 minutes and 30 seconds of ads.