Tomás Gennari on OTT panel: There are 228 streaming services operating in LatAm

Latin America has grown rapidly in the adoption of broadband, increasing from 56.8 million homes for the last quarter of 2016 to 86.01 million in the last third of 2021, said Tomás Gennari, CEO of BB, during the panel “The LatAm landscape” on the framework of the virtual event OTT.X Online Live 2022. He added that although the average number of OTT services registered per household was 5.8 for the third quarter of 2021, the number is much lower -1.2- when it includes account sharing.

He reported that in Latin America there are 228 streaming services operating. But while the world talks about the streaming war, in the region it is “streaming survival” because the cost per household for pay-TV services -about US$19- is very high for LatAm, even though in the US this cost is US$50 per household.

The panel, moderated by Gennari, also included Duda Nagata, director of Data & Insights for Latin America at WarnerMedia; Inés Salles, director of OTT Content at ViX/TelevisaUnivision; and Stephen Brooks, president of Latido Music.

Latido Music, launched in the US in 2019, is a service recently available in Latin America on the FAST channels, a segment that has grown a lot in the last six months. “We feel very optimistic in this market and we expect a great consumption. It is a great time to step into Latin America” Brooks said.

Salles de ViX made a brief account of the journey made by ViX, which achieved one billion views globally after beginning video production, in 2019 acquired Pongalo, and in 2020 entered as a free service in Latin America. In February 2021 it was acquired by Univisión and is now part of TelevisaUnivision.

Gennari recommended that is essential to develop a very competitive price and partnership strategy for any OTT platform in Latin America. “In order to quickly increase the user base, we’ve seen that one of the best practices is strategic alliances with cable operators and telcos from the very moment of the OTT launch. We even see with great admiration the new types of alliances that are being made with Rappi and Mercado Libre, among others,” he highlighted.

For Brooks, one of the biggest obstacles, when you enter a territory like Latin America, is that you are dealing with 20 countries versus a single market in the US. “You need to have multiple strategies to reach consumers in those markets. You cannot adopt the same model that we have in the United States,” he indicated.

Salles and Nagata highlighted the importance of dubbing and subtitling content in the region. For Salles, it was a challenge to integrate content from Brazil into the ViX catalog, both because of the language and availability. “We license original content from small independent producers and get some pretty unique productions.” While Nagata pointed out that Latin America always demands both options -subtitling and dubbing-.