U.S. HISPANIC
Claxson: Hybrid platforms future of the OTT
Maribel Ramos-Weiner| 7 de noviembre de 2019
Panel Sling Latino Claxson FlixLatino HBO Go
Mariano Varela, CEO, and general manager of Claxson expressed that the future of OTT integrated to pay-TV is going towards a hybrid model where there will be linear platforms and others of added, direct to consumer value. Varela, who participated in the panel “Integration of OTT in pay-TV,” announced that Claxson went from being a linear platform to one of added value.
“It was a great learning to go from B2C to being B2B. We currently have a hybrid platform, we coexist with that duality. It is a platform that operators can commercialize as an add-on or find it directly, it is TV everywhere, added value,” explained Varela, who was accompanied on the discussion panel by Luis Guillermo Villanueva, COO of SOMOS Next; Nicolás Coates, Head of Sling Latino; Juan Martínez, Senior Product Manager at Irdeto and Dionne Bermúdez, VP of Digital Distribution and Business Research at HBO Latin America.
Villanueva expressed that with FlixLatino the goal was to bring the best cinema in Spanish and the way to do it was B2C.
Bermúdez added that they have done very well with B2C and B2B, “it is a natural evolution for us, especially in Latin America due to the payment mechanism”.
Regarding the devices chosen for the service, Coates clarified that it is necessary to balance costs and benefits. There is a huge number of devices, ranging from Roku and Apple TV to the Samsung and LG television sets, to mention a few. “In an ideal world, we would love to be on all the platforms or have chosen from the start the four main ones,” he highlighted.
Bermúdez feels it is necessary to analyze which device can give them the greatest reach in Latin America with HBO Go. “If we take into account integration with operators but in a different way in each market” she commented.
