To understand the role of the emerging streaming business in Europe, another of the sessions on the fourth day of VS Next, hosted players such as Atresmedia/ATRESPlayer Premium (Spain), SIC/OPTO (Portugal) and Good Move / COO iXMedia/Serially (Italy), who described their business strategy in this competitive market for streaming.
This panel, which was co-organized with Conecta FICTION & Entertainment and moderated by its founder and director, Geraldine Gonard, was starred by Emilio Sánchez Zaballos, online platform and video manager, Atresmedia/ATRESPlayer Premium (Spain); Vanessa Fino Tierno, Director of Acquisitions & Format Management, SIC/OPTO (Portugal); and Massimo Vimini, CEO, Good Move / COO iXMedia/Serially (Italy).
Tierno, who is in charge of local production and acquisition of OPTO content, spoke about the differentials of one of the newest streaming platforms in Portugal. Just one year and three months after its official launch, it is the only one with an offer aimed at the local audience, and the first AVOD in this market owned by a Portuguese company. ‘OPTO is part of SIC Portugal, the leading media company in Portugal. In this market there are currently about 2.6 million account users, which is probably 50 or 60% of the population that accesses at least one streaming service, so there are many players in this market, and you have to understand that there’s a lot of fragmentation and that the market is growing quite rapidly. In this scenario, we are the only local AVOD service that competes with all the SVOD services out there and that is what sets us apart, in addition to our content expertise’. The executive also said that to differentiate itself from other players, the service makes available fictions in different genres, not just soap operas, and also news blocks distributed at different times of the day.
Sánchez Zaballos, who is in charge of RTVE’s streaming service, spoke about the dedicated selection of content, original productions and the deals they make for the service. ‘We have the backing of one of the most important free-to-air channels in Spain, so we also have a strong focus on local content. We have two business models, AVOD and SVOD, and we also have TV exclusives that later go to the Atresplayer screen or vice versa’. The executive reported that they have more than 400,000 active subscribers per month: ‘It’s a huge number, if we take into account that Spain is a market where people tend to consume more open TV than platforms. Our differential is our original fictions with local talents, in fact we recently announced our 20 original productions that will debut on the service in the next three years’.
Lastly, Vimini explained that an AVOD platform launched in Italy about seven months ago: ‘It is a challenge for those involved, cause some of us come from advertising, and it is precisely this need for quality content to position advertising with good KPI results, which made us enter the streaming market’. The executive explained that his direct competition is not the big streamers, but the players in the field of AVOD, which are basically the major broadcasters in the region: ‘that is why we are making content available that is very different from what is seen in Italy for free, and since we are aiming at a more specific business, we are only working with TV series for now, and we are also already in talks to integrate FAST channels into our offer’.
