Netflix Launches $4 Mobile-only Monthly Plan in Malaysia

Netflix is ready to take its lower-cost, mobile-only offering beyond India as it looks to expand the reach of its service in other international markets. From a report: The American on-demand video streaming giant today launched a new price tier in Malaysia that would allow people in the nation to access the video service for RM 17 ($4) a month. The new tier, which is being offered alongside existing regular monthly plans that start from $7.8, limits access to Netflix to just one mobile device and in lower video quality (standard definition, ~480p). (Customers subscribed to this plan are not allowed to watch -- or cast -- Netflix on their TVs and laptops.) The company, which began testing cheaper mobile plans last year in many markets including Malaysia, said it is hopeful that its new plan would "broaden access to Netflix in this truly mobile-first nation." More than 88% of people in Malaysia own a smartphone and 78% of internet users in the Southeast Asian nation -- home to roughly 32 million people -- stream and download media content, according to industry

$4/mo is 3.2% of median income in Malaysia

[Anonymous Coward]

So they seriously want Malaysians to spend 3.2% of their income on a streaming plan...

That's quite absurd if you ask me.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

Absurd compared to what? How much are those people paying for their monthly cellphone plans which has to include enough data to be able to stream in the first place?

Thanks for adding to his argument.

[BAReFO0t]

Yeah, they already pay a likely overpriced plan. And Netflix wants them to pay their protection money on top?

Where do you think that money should come from? What of their useless trinkets and luxury items that they usually blow the money on, like ... food and clothing, will get cut?

(Hint: People there will just keep using file sharing.)

Little Price

[Retired ICS]

How apropos. Little price for watching postage stamp video.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

How is it "postage stamp video"? Let me remind you that 480p used to be the top-of-the-line, i.e. DVDs. And if you're talking about the size of the display, smartphones are now as big as small tablets.

I'm in Canada and I have a basic account that only has 480p, but I still watch Netflix on a 19" widescreen monitor. If it's good enough for that setup, it's more than enough for a smartphone.

Not everyone want/need 4K/60 on a 2000" TV*.

* except Frank, of course.

Yeah, but how will you see those pixels?

[BAReFO0t]

With PPI rates way above necessary.

And who cares what the resolution of a "postage stamp" display is?
Remember those morons who always watched shitty cam-rips and then complained that the movies sucked? This is a "modern" version of that.

_ _ _ _
(Actually, it's backwards since we degenerated from decentralized file sharing to centralized FTP-like bittorrent to streaming and paying protection money to the artist-leeching organized crime again, instead of killing them with cocaine withdrawal and fire, financin

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

What do you mean by "how will they see the pixels"?
PPI doesn't enter into account, the size of the image is scaled to fit the size of the display.

Postage labels as big as tablets

[tepples]

How is it "postage stamp video"?

Anyone who has worked in an online retailer's warehouse is likely to have encountered shipping labels that include metered postage. These are 4 by 6 inches (10 by 15 cm), about twice the area of a 5" phone's display. Half the label's area contains from and to addresses, and the other half contains a 2D barcode for postage and a 1D barcode for tracking. (See, for example, the Priority Mail label pictured in photos of a Zebra LP2844 printer [amazon.com].)

And if you're talking about the size of the display, smartphones are now as big as small tablets.

In a lot of cases, it is indeed about the physical area of the displ

Re:

[Retired ICS]

I suppose it depends how far away from your eyes it is. A bitty cell phone at 6" probably occupies the same field of view as a 19" monitor at arms length, which is the same as my 80" display at 7 feet. However, I don't think you will get 9.1 channel surround sound out of a tiny cell phone speaker.

Probably why Crave is designed for viewing on nothing larger than about a foot diagonal with nothing but mpeg3 joint stereo audio, both at very low bitrates, since that seems to be all the average subscriber to t

Re:

[Bradac_55]

19" widescreen monitor ??? Maybe in 2000.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

You're absolutely right, I was thinking of my old 5:4 computer monitor.

I meant to say 23" widescreen monitor.

Re:

[Damian Harrison]

I'm a little paranoid about apps on a mobile phone. It seems to me that mobile Netflix is one big security hole. I have too many financial applications (bank, e-wallet, webmoney) to conduct dubious experiments. I wasn't even recommended to answer unfamiliar numbers in order not to accidentally give root access. I check such calls on the free-lookup.net [free-lookup.net] database. I can’t say anything about hackers, but it clearly saved me from a ton of cold spam calls.

What's their average income?

[BAReFO0t]

Is it, maybe, ten to twenty times lower than ours?

(No idea what Netflix costs usually, since I don't support the organized crime with protection money nor otherwise.)

Re:

[Retired ICS]

NetFlix is a tremendous value.

Decent quality video for everything with very few compression artifacts that were not in the source. The audio is a properly encoded Dolby Digital or Dolby Digital Plus stream which may contain up to 7.1 discrete channels representing the original source audio track, though these do have encoding artifacts. Newer material has a higher bandwidth available which gets rid of those artifacts. The discrete channels (no matter how many there are) are also properly matrixed. The h

Try to compete with iFlix

[propheth]

iFlix offers free streaming. Their motto is "Why torrent when you can iflix."

netflix

[alphacrown]

Netflix is changing the world. At recent, most of the usa user prefer netflix as they offer best streaming services. Malaysia is a country where almost literacy rate is good and people use video streaming most, so that good for them. https://www.techcrench.com/ [techcrench.com]