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Amazon provides Prime Members access to 100 Million Songs and more features

When Amazon Prime first came out, it was a service that offered customers cheaper or free access to options for faster shipping. As the Prime members increased, the company also began introducing new features like access to its streaming video and music services.

Amazon revealed a new perk for its Prime members that may tempt some users away from competing services like Apple Music or Spotify.

There is good news for Amazon Prime members. Amazon will now provide 100 million songs in shuffle mode to Amazon Prime subscribers. Although Amazon Prime members do not have unlimited access to music on demand, shuffle mode does provide access to the whole collection.

Users can make playlists that are customized to their individual listening preferences and the songs are ad-free. Any artist, album, or playlist can be put on shuffle. This suggests that users must repeatedly skip through a huge number of tracks before finding the ones they want.

Amazon noted that “Prime members will now be able to stream more music than ever before. We’ve expanded the Amazon Music catalog for Prime members to include more than 100 million songs—up from 2 million—entirely ad-free.

Prime members can explore music and podcasts based on their likes; shuffle play any artist, album, or playlist in the catalog; and stream a collection of All-Access playlists tailored to personalized listening preferences on demand and available to download for offline listening.”

The company revealed that it will now provide Prime members with a complete music catalog with 100 million songs, as opposed to the earlier, more constrained selection of just 2 million songs, and will make the majority of the most popular podcasts on its site available without ads.

The move is a direct jab at rivals in the streaming music industry, particularly Spotify, which has been entering the podcast sector in an effort to increase revenue. However, despite paying for the service, Spotify’s paying subscribers are growing impatient with the fact that they still have to listen to podcast advertisements.

Amazon believes that the combination of a full music catalog and the promise of ad-free podcasts from Amazon Music will make it a strong substitute. Moreover, the Amazon Music app is getting a makeover, and a new “Podcast Previews” feature will enable users to listen to brief snippets in order to find new podcasts they might enjoy.

Recently, the company announced the availability of auto-generated, synced transcripts on a few podcasts for US users. For certain Amazon Originals podcast episodes, transcripts are available.

This is an excellent move by Amazon, given both Apple and Spotify indicated that they would look into raising the prices for its streaming services.

Amazon runs the online music store and streaming service known as Amazon Music. In January 2008, it became the first music store to offer music from numerous independent artists as well as the four major record labels (EMI, Universal, Warner, and Sony BMG) without digital rights management (DRM).

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Netflix to charge $6.99 a month for ‘Basic With Ads’ Plan

Beginning in November, the American streaming provider Netflix will launch a new, inexpensive tier subscription “basic with ads” that is supported by advertisements.

In twelve nations, Netflix will launch a subscription model in November that is subsidized by advertisements as the company attempts to increase sales and subscriber numbers. The subscription, dubbed “basic with ads,” will cost $6.99 in the US, $3 cheaper than the country’s basic option without advertisements.

Netflix battled user churn after suffering the largest-ever quarterly decline in subscribers recently in June. This new model will soon launch in Brazil, Australia, Britain, Britain, Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Mexico, France, and the United States. This ad-supported subscription is a first for Netflix. This move is a significant change for a company that pioneered the concept of ad-free membership-based streaming.

Users of Netflix’s “Basic with ads” tier won’t be able to download films and television shows, and there will often be four or five minutes of adverts every hour. Due to licensing limitations, a few TV shows and films will initially be inaccessible.

Before and throughout Netflix’s content, there will be 15-30 second advertisements. Firms will be able to stop adverts from showing up on content they consider objectionable or nasty. Nielsen, a rating business, will start using its Digital Ad Ratings in the United States in 2023 to assist marketers in understanding its reach.

When Disney+’s ad tier debuts in December, it will cost $7.99 per month, while Hulu will cost $7.99. Netflix is less expensive at $6.99 per month. The monthly cost of HBO Max with advertisements is $9.99.

Netflix has set the price of the service such that any customers who convert from the ad-free standard plan to the ad-supported plan will have a “neutral to positive” impact on the business’s income. This indicates Netflix will earn at least $3 in advertising income per customer each month.

Instead of 1080p, the resolution of Netflix’s normal plan, which costs $15.49 per month, the video resolution for the ad-tier plan will be 720p. The company’s entry-level plan, which features 720p resolution but no advertising, costs $9.99 per month.

Netflix referred to the new tier as “pro-consumer” during a press conference where it unveiled it. It also revealed that its inner content tagging specialists were charged with locating natural breakpoints in numerous series and movies to insert adverts in.

As reported by The Verge, Netflix’s ad tier is a reaction to an unexpected slump for the streaming service, which earlier this year lost over a million users in the United States and Canada. The company also saw a decline in its stock price as a result of investor doubts that its phase of significant growth has come to an end.

Although the company has stated that it aims to roll out the new ad tier in more countries over time, India is not among the 12 countries wherein Netflix is first introducing the ad-supported plan. Given the price-sensitive character of the Indian market, it is important to note that Netflix offers some of the most affordable subscription plans when compared to its offerings in other regions.

Netflix plans in India start at Rs 149, or roughly $2 per month for phone devices only. The cheapest Netflix subscription in India starts at Rs 199 per month, which translates to about $2.6 per month for other devices such as smart televisions. The “regular” version of the streaming service costs Rs 499 per month in India, offers high-definition content streaming across two devices, and is ad-free.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Netflix to Roll-out a Cheaper Mobile-only Plan to Target More Users in India

Leave a Comment / India, News, Tech News / By Yashica Vashishtha

The online video streaming services are taking over the entertainment industry, and there has been the rise of many of them Netflix being the leader of all. But amid the high competition, Netflix is also having some issues in regaining its customers. For the past few months, the company has also been facing slower growth due to the rise in its subscription plan prices, as well as the rise of other companies like Amazon that offering fancy discounts and original content over their platform.

The company has seen the lowest growth in the past few months, and only half of the expected number of new users have subscribed to Netflix in the first quarter of this year that just ended in June.

To be the leader in the filed, the company has to take some serious steps, to begin with, reduced prices. Netflix just announced that it will be starting up a new but cheaper mobile-only streaming plan, India being the first recipient of the new plan. The company revealed the news on Wednesday, adding that India is the biggest growing market, where it will be easier to get to most of the users with lowered prices.

“After several months of testing, we’ve decided to roll out a lower-priced mobile-only plan in India to complement our existing plans. We believe this plan, which will launch in Q3, will be an effective way to introduce a larger number of people in India to Netflix and to further expand our business in a market where Pay-TV ARPU is low (below $5),” said Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix.

According to a report, despite being the biggest population, only 2 million people are subscribed to Netflix in India. The company said that it may gain more subscribers if it reduces the subscription prices for the Indian users, The basic Netflix monthly plan starts at Rs 500 which allows the users to access Netflix on a single screen at a time. With the announcement, the company disclosed that the new plan will only work on mobile devices and will render a 480p picture quality.

While testing the new plan in March, Netflix offered the users a price as cheap as Rs 250 ($3.63) for it, but there has been no revelation on what will be the prices for the original plan. The company will be bringing the plan by the third quarter of this year in India, and later, it may also expand to other countries.

Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

www.xornor.co

Dropbox Increases Storage for its Subscription Plans with Added New Features

News, Tech News / By Yashica Vashishtha

Dropbox, one of the most loved cloud storage provider, is going to increase the storage for its subscribers with a slight increase in the prices in the subscription plans. Now the subscribers will get better storage options for all its plans including Plus, Business, and Professional, and that too with newly added features.

The company has revised the prices of its Pus plan, increasing the storage capacity to 2TB of storage, up from 1TB. The price for the Plus plan will now be $12 per month from its previous $10. Dropbox has also added new features, like Dropbox Smart Sync and Dropbox Rewind to all its subscription plans. Dropbox Smart Sync feature will look for the items in the hard drive that have been idle for a long time and mark them as online-only. This way, it will move the out of date items from the hard drive and make space for the new stuff.

On the other hand, the Rewind feature will help the users to roll back some of its actions like deletion of some important data and the accidental edits done in the past 30 days. Along with those two features, Dropbox will be bringing the full-text search for the Plus users. The subscribers who will pay annually will get a $2 discount on the subscription fee.

For the Professional plan, the storage has been increased to 3TB from 2TB at the old price $19.99 per month. And like before, the price of the one-month subscription will remain $16.58 if paid annually. Both Smart Sync and the Rewind feature are enabled for this plan too, the latter being able to work for the past 180 days. The Professional plan subscribers will also get access to the watermarking tool, such that they can use the same to protect their work from being copied.

The price for the Business plan is also the same, but the storage has been increased from 3TB to 5TB. The plan will include the discussed features, and the 120-day version history has also been upgraded to 180-days version history for the subscribers.

The storage capacity for the Dropbox subscription plans has been increased for every subscriber. For the old subscribers, too, the storage has been increased immediately. For them, the plan price will remain the same until their subscription ends, and they subscribe for the new cycle. The new subscribers will need to pay the increased price for the Plus plan.

Yashica Vashishtha

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