Netflix India’s Monika Shergill Talks Local Content Strategy, Success Of ‘RRR’ & ‘Gangubai Kathiawadi’ & Why Streaming Has “Revolutionized Cinema In India”

deadline.com:

As Wall Street anxiously awaits Netflix’s second quarter financial results today, with the streamer having already warned it could face more subscriber losses (as many as 2 million this quarter), the push for growth in India feels more crucial than ever for the company.Last year, Netflix India made a bold move in slashing prices across its four subscription tiers, notably cutting its popular ‘Basic’ plan by a huge 60%, reducing it from $6.24 (499 rupees) a month to just $2.49 (199 rupees).

While the company didn’t state a reason at the time for the price cut, Netflix India’s Vice President of Content Monika Shergill now tells Deadline that the strategic move was made in a bid to open up the service to a broader range of audiences across the Indian market.Six months down the line, Shergill says the pricing cut is “working very well for us, and it’s brought in a whole new set of audiences,” enabling Netflix India to prioritize subscriber growth at a time when the company had begun to ramp up its licensing and original programming slate beyond Hindi and English-language content.“It’s a very different pricing model,” she says of the Indian streaming market, adding that most local competitors work on annual plans with the benefit of big discounts from telco partners. “For us, our revision of the pricing was very well-timed with our content strategy and the new slate we were rolling out.

We were very clear that when we started programming for a broader set of audiences that we would need to increase access and the pricing was a very important part of it.”Tapping into the multi-cultural nation, which has a population of more than 1.4 billion, 22 official languages and more than 800 TV channels and multiple film industries, was