Main income will be from Internet service

Gabriel Forenza, CTO of Grupo TV-SA, feels that in the next couple of years the cost of an Internet versus cable subscription is going to be leveled. “I think an Internet service will start to be more expensive than cable. The main income will be from an Internet service” he said in the context of the panel Operadores de TV Paga: El Camino a OTT Dataxis’ Nextv Series Argentina 2020. He added that another trend will be TV à la carte. “We will have much more granularity and we will be more similar to OTT”.

According to José Luis Jacquet Matillon, general director of El Cuatro TV, the TV will become a service about the Internet and “we will have access to big data. The audience will be more demanding with platforms. We are all going to compete for that client’s money”.

The challenges mentioned by the panelists on the path to OTT include having a solid network for the connection and integration of the different technologies in a single top box set that allows connecting to other content providers such as YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix. In this respect, Forenza mentioned that it is complicated. “The technology that we believe could solve this issue is Android TV, but it is complex to have an Android TV top box set that works with the different DRM and that is compatible with everything we need it to work with. And it is essential for the network to work. Another point is for it to have a reasonable cost because a US$100 top box set and a US$18 ARPU is impossible today in Argentina,” he said.

Gustavo Lerner from Verimatrix; Mario Carranza, VP of Contents and Television at Davitel-CABASE, and Gustavo Morande, Executive Director of Zapping TV, were also on the panel.