Maria Rua Aguete, Senior Research Director, Media & Entertainment, OMDIA (UK), was the moderator of the first panel at LA Virtual Screenings 2022, which featured the players Tubi, Roku, Rakuten, Samsung TV Plus and Pluto TV, offering some perspectives on the AVOD market today, and how this model is attracting audiences in various markets.
OMDIA’s Maria Rua Aguete has brought recent data compiled by the consultant: ‘In 2020 the highlight was online overtaken pay-tv, but the trend we are seeing is that online subscriptions will reach 2 billions in 2027. Today, the 60% of streaming video revenues come from the fast online video space’. She assured that online video advertising will be the number one source of revenue in the media entertainment space, and expressed that ‘it will not be a surprise that big players want to take a portion of this business’.
Cristian Liarte, Director of Originals, Rakuten TV: We have a presence in 43 European countries and the service can be used on smart TVs, mobiles and websites, with a great list of recent and bluckbusters’ content. Rakuten TV’s differentiator, according to the executive, lies in the form of distribution: ‘We have alliances with partners in Europe, which are television manufacturers, who include a Rakuten button on their controls, some of these are Samsung and LG. Also, another of our differentiators is our catalog that is constantly renewed, because we have visualization alliances for shorter periods, so the contents are updated’.
Paul Edwards, VP, Content Pluto TV, spoke about the territories where the service is available, currently adding 30 territories, the most recent being in Scandinavia, which together have more than 68 million active users: ‘ Our differentiated value is the curation of content, separated into specific genres, and constantly renewed. We have a team dedicated to this task, in fact the content of Spain is not the same as that of Latam’. The executive also said that Pluto TV is not looking to generate originals at the moment, but is instead focused on the great bookstore that they acquire together with their major Paramount.
Sam Harowitz, VP, Content Acquisitions & Partnerships, Tubi, emphasized that the company is having on Hispanic content and sports: ‘We have a catalog of more than 40,000 titles between films and series, and in recent years we have released more than 25 FAST news, sports and entertainment channels. One of our recent bets is sports in the FAST space, which makes sense, since we are part of the FOX family and we have a synergy with FOX Sports, so we are looking to expand our alliances to offer some extra content within this countryside’.
Bilai Joa Silar, SVP, OTT Content, TelevisaUnivision, highlighted the recently launched platform, saying that the service has more than 50,000 hours of free content, it also has live news produced by TelevisaUnivision, as well as live sports, as rights transmission of the Champions League in the US and in Mexico of the World Cup and La Liga. ‘We make use of our extensive Televisa and Univision library, but we are also signing alliances with third party companies for more content to offer our community. We will eventually start co-production, but we are currently looking for talent and IP to develop internally’.
Aline Jabbour, Director of Business Development and Content Acquisition, Samsung TV Plus Latin America, describe the service growing position in Latin America: ‘I think our fame has a bit to do with our interface and with that return to the classic way of watch TV as a family. Samsung TV Plus is active as soon as you turn on the TV, I mean, it’s not a separate application that you have to access, I think that’s a great engagement in the first place. We pay special attention to localized content to improve the content experience in each of the territories where it is located, I think that is one of our differentiators’.
Lastly, Adriana Naves, Head of Content Distribution, Latin America, Roku Inc., remarked why the service is one of the most used in the US: ‘One of the differentiators of our product is that we are one of the main platform aggregators in the United States, where each user can manage their different paid accounts from the same platform without resorting to external sites. We have an interface that has grown a lot to be intuitive, but also Roku functions as a streaming service, which is also growing with great success in the FAST space with eight channels in territories such as the USA, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Peru’.
