Netflix giveth and occasionally the streaming platform taketh away. Mostly it taketh away just lately, with the company cracking down on sharing accounts outside of single households and eying paid password revenue. It’s about time it tried something else.
That ‘something’ is making its most expensive tier just a little more attractive. After all, getting subscribers to go from a standard subscription to a Premium one counts as increased revenue. And, if you’re a certain sort of viewer, the streaming platform’s incoming upgrades might just justify the cost.
Sounds like a good idea, Netflix
The company announced new features for its Premium subscribers, both new and existing, via its website yesterday. The headline feature is the inclusion of spatial audio support for (some of) the content on Netflix. This is “an immersive, cinematic sound experience on any device with no additional equipment required”. It’s okay if you don’t believe it. The company’s sort of expecting it. So much so that it has released a demo video. The first one’s free and all that.
Spatial audio is apparently already available for more than 700 Netflix titles and various upcoming content will include the tech as well. There’s a new spatial audio icon on the platform that denotes whether a presentation offers the sound tech. It should go without saying that this will be confined to the company’s content (for now).
If you’re in the market for fancy stereo support, you’ll have to pay for Netflix’s top plan. It’s… not a bad feature in practice though headphones are almost certainly a must to get the best performance from it. If you’re using headphones, you might just be watching on a portable device like a tablet, laptop, or phone. Well, if you happen to be using the first two, there’s another feature coming for Premium subscribers.
That would be an increased number of device downloads. Currently, Premium users can download content to four devices. The new system will increase this number by two, for a total of six devices. At least everybody can watch what they want during load shedding. But, as we said, you’ll have to drop R200 on the streaming service each month for the privilege.
