Netflix to give away free subscription for two days to entire country of India as it searches for new ways to encourage signups

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Netflix will give away two days of free subscriptions to everyone in India as it experiments with new ways to encourage people to sign up.

The promotion comes after it stopped offering free trial periods and instead committed to try a number of different ways of finding new subscribers.

The offer will come as part of a "StreamFest" event that will only be available in India for now, though it is not clear if the same or similar promotions will launch anywhere else.

The aim is for the two day offer to be something that “could really create an event”, according to Greg Peters, Netflix’s chief operating officer. Mr Peters announced the change during the company’s earning call.

“And so an idea that we're excited about and we'll see how it goes, but we think that giving everyone in a country access to Netflix for free for a weekend could be a great way to expose a bunch of new people to the amazing stories that we have, the service, how the service works, really create an event, and hopefully get a bunch of those folks to sign up,” Mr Peters said in response to response to questions about why the company had brought an end to free trials.

“So we're going to try that in India and we'll see how that goes. And that's just an example of the kind of innovation that we seek to do in this space.”

Mr Peters also gave more information on the company’s decision to stop offering free trials in the US. While he did not say why exactly the decision had been made, he indicated it had come after “constantly assessing and testing and trying to understand what's working, what's working best, how do we improve”, and that it had “shifted those tactics” in response to testing.

The free weekend is just one of the many different strategies that Netflix has tried to keep new subscribers coming to the service, as it attempts to find ways to continue its recent rapid growth.

Those have also included taking some shows out from behind its paywall, offering the first episodes of shows such as Stranger Things and films such as Bird Box for free and then asking customers to sign up if they want to see more.