U.S. HISPANIC
Telecom Argentina: You cannot have a successful platform without investment scale
Maribel Ramos-Weiner| 21 de junio de 2023
Ariel Barlaro Dataxis Gonzalo Hita Telecom
Gonzalo Hita, COO of Telecom was on the one-to-one session of the first day of the Nextv Series South America where he was interviewed by Ariel Barlaro, VP of the Americas at Dataxis.
“The biggest challenge is the size of the investment needed in a platform because you cannot have a successful platform without investment scale (…) The development challenge is constant and there are many problems to be solved: the delay in live events and how to show the content ‘gondola’, are some,” commented the senior executive.
Important lessons were learned from the broadcast of the Qatar 2022 World Cup. Among them, the need to supply a demand for games on the mobile phone screen and continue to reduce the delay, which could reduced from 40 to 25 seconds, but still work must be done. Also, Flow Flex, which allowed to watch the games for free, campaigned strongly for the download of the app in time, however, there was an over demand in the last few minutes. “There is no platform able to withstand such an avalanche of downloads ten minutes before a game. The lesson is that we have to generate smaller events earlier and avoid last minute excess of downloads,” Hita pointed out.
He commented that although the evolution of the television model reduced pay TV revenues and forced cable operators to reinvent themselves, there is still an opportunity to curate content (OTT, TV signals, VOD) and offer it in a friendly way to customers. “And in that world of embedded OTT, there are the big ones like Prime Video or Netflix with inflexible contracts, but there are others like Paramount with which it’s possible a good coexistence. Yellowstone has had an excellent performance in its five seasons and I am absolutely convinced that if that content had been on Paramount’s paid app competing with Netflix in the app strip, it would not have had so many views. There still is a model for us to easily expose content to our customers.”
He also argued that there are many OTTs with excellent content that are not known because they lack exposure. “They need us as a distribution chain, I am convinced that this is the case, but they will convince themselves insofar as they continue without selling.”
Hita also highlighted that producing and co-producing fiction in Argentina is a very big effort because to have a successful series you have to produce five, but today 20% of Flow’s views on demand are those original productions.
