Telefónica: Windowing was well defined in the past, now that pipe stopped feeding pay TV

The loss of windows is one of the aspects that worries Gonzalo Arrisueño Labarthe, Telefónica’s content manager for Latin America in the current scenario. Arrisueño, who along with Federico Canonigo, Flow Content and Programming Manager, participated in the talk “New Trends in Linear and Non-Linear Programming in Latin America” on the first day of NextTV Content Distribution Latin America 2021.

“Before you had a very defined windowing, that pipe stopped feeding pay TV. Without the windows it ends like an archive platform,” Arrisueño pointed out.

Canonigo, for his part, talked about how pay TV is no longer the exclusive window for soccer leagues. “It is a harsh change. It is not what has been lost, but what has been shared”, he stressed. “There are sports contents where the investment was so great that it was not recovered. Now it has changed, because there are fewer players buying sports content due to the merger between Disney and FOX, but the relevant ones generate traction for people to buy a pay TV package. The issue is the price,” he said.

Arrisueño agreed that this means a change in the game. “We have not lost them, but we have shared them, and there is the impression that there is more sports content on apps than on pay TV.”

Another aspect that stood out was the use of data to make decisions about programming. “Intuition is still important, but we have the data of what our subscribers consume from our content. We go half in half with data and intuition. This is invaluable. Preconceived myths of the industry are being demolished,” mentioned Arrisueño.

For Canonigo, this shift towards data where “everything is measured to see what they like and what they don’t” will help to be more accurate.