LAVA is the new OTT of Star Media, one of the fastest growing Russian producers and distributors in the market. With an original production catalog, and with an offer of different genres, the company has an ambitious roll out plan that includes Latin America.
Prensario spoke with Sergey Kupreev, Chief business development officer, who provided details of the OTT’s operation and its expansion plans. LAVA‘s operation began after an agreement with the US leader in the development and adaptation of cutting-edge technologies, OTTera, whose alliance contemplates an extension of opportunities to view Star Media content for the global audience thanks to the launch of the OTT on different devices. .
According to Kupreev, in the initial stage, the service will offer the company’s most popular content with an additional extension to the entire library, representing more than 7.5 thousand hours of ready-to-use content.
‘Most of the projects will be available both dubbed and subtitled in 6 to 8 languages, including English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and others. In the second stage of our plan, the company will offer cooperation opportunities to all its partners whose content is already successfully added by the company’s multichannel network on YouTube and protected against illegal downloads by ContentScan, a service that works with the use of technology of artificial intelligence’, commented the executive.
The platform is already available on Apple, Android, Amazon Fire TV and Roku. Kupreev added that they are negotiating with major manufacturers that allow SMART TV to be used, and negotiating the launch of LAVA with aggregators and syndication platforms. The service operates under a hybrid AVOD and SVOD service, and in addition to its catalog, the executive noted that they are working with partners and considering the opportunity to expand the LAVAlibrary to more than 10,000 hours of content.
Regarding the expansion of the service in Latin America, Kupreev pointed out that in the first stage, they will be developing and promoting LAVA in the countries that have the greatest potential for Russian-speaking audiences: ‘Having analyzed the statistics of content consumption on YouTube and as Due to the size of the Russian-speaking expat communities, we have chosen Brazil, Mexico and Argentina as the main countries to promote LAVA. Our content will be available in Portuguese and Spanish. We are willing to consider partnerships with local platforms and content producers’.
