Maca Rotter 2020
For Maca Rotter, CEO of Arena Esports GG, one rival that should concern linear television is gaming. “Making these audiences change to new platforms is very difficult. It is one of the biggest challenges we can have because they are not used to watching linear television. They are used to deciding what they want to watch, which is a subject of digital streaming,” she said.
Rotter explained that they are audiences for which spending three or four hours listening to a gamer giving tips on how to go to the next level is part of their entertainment.
“Audiences are becoming more educated, and if their level of fanaticism is higher, it can be compared to any sport. They are digital native audiences that understand entertainment from another point of view. Gaming is a head-to-head competition against fictional series that have cost a lot of money,” she said.
She explained that it is important, as an industry, to turn to the issue of gaming, because “we are losing sight of a very educated captive market, with purchasing power, with very interesting demographics that will not be on other platforms, that does not even by chance visit open TV, which does not make a stop on pay television and probably spends 80% of its time on a streaming platform”.
For sports news, it is easier to work on this topic in terms of live events since these are more similar to a sporting event. But making gaming shows for linear television is a real challenge, she said. “It has to have a 100% entertainment profile, it has to be a reality show, something that makes people integrate from the entertainment point of view. Watching someone play and learning how to play by watching is not going to happen on linear television.”
In the end, gaming is a format for another type of platform. “But we can’t stop seeing it as entertainment, because that’s what’s competing with us today.”
