Netflix’s Latam competitors keep sprouting up

Juan Pablo Conti ©RapidTVNews | 08-10-2011

Netflix, the over-the-top (OTT) video services provider hoping to replicate its North American success in Latin America, has learned that it will face competition from yet another domestic telco.
Since Netflix's launch in the region about a month ago, hardly a week has gone by without at least one new OTT service being announced by a local company at a key Latin American pay-TV market.
The latest operator to join this growing list was Telecom Argentina, which earlier this week launched ArnetPlay. The video streaming service will be offered on a 50 Pesos (US$11.90) monthly fee, reduced to 30 Pesos (US$7.10) during the first six months. It will give customers access to a video catalogue containing 2,500 titles, including films, TV series, music concerts and adult content.
Seven of Hollywood's most important studios will be supplying their content output to the new platform, according to Telecom. The company plans to keep its catalogue fresh by upgrading it with 500 new titles every month. However, new and recently released Hollywood films won't be included in the flat-rate monthly fee. Instead, they will cost up to 16 Pesos (US$3.80) each to watch.
The Argentine telco invested US$120 million in the project. Besides content right acquisition, the funds were spent to roll out a national content delivery network (CDN).
At the moment, the CDN hosts 14 powerful video servers, which have been strategically deployed in areas close to where demand for the service is expected to be the highest. Telecom is confident that it can sign up 15,000 subscribers during the first six months of operations, and 40,000 during the first year.
In order to gain access to ArnetPlay, users will require a minimum broadband speed of 3 Mbit/s. Initially, the OTT offering will only be available to Arnet (the DSL service marketed by Telecom) customers. But the telco plans to open up access to all other broadband users in the country starting from next year.
If it does so, ArnetPlay will come into direct competition not only with Netflix and OnVideo (another OTT service launched by Telefónica earlier this year) but also with established pay-TV operators such as Cablevisión and DirecTV.
And while all of these players jostle for a slice of the Argentine pay-TV pie, they will be well aware that the main threat they collectively face is that posed by Cuevana, the free – and illegal – video streaming website that remains Argentineans' favorite source of online movies.