OTT won’t destroy cable – it will complement it


Juan Pablo Conti ©RapidTVNews | 01-12-2011

Rather than pushing pay-TV customers to cut the cord, the rise of Netflix and its army of imitators will be a beneficial force that will broaden the spectrum of home entertainment choices.

That, at least, was the shared view of two of the industry experts who gathered in Buenos Aires, Argentina this week for the NexTV Latin America Summit 2011, organized by market research firm Dataxis.
"The future of television is a combination between pay TV and the value-added over-the-top (OTT) services that we are beginning to see," said Sandra Conejos, the Latin American director of hybrid set-top box supplier Amino.
In Argentina alone, six companies have launched a broadband-distributed video subscription service during the past 12 months. One of them is Telefónica, whose On Video OTT product has now attracted 30,000 viewers. But Andrés Bargues, head of multimedia services with Telefónica Argentina, agreed with Conejos: "Clearly, this is a market that complements pay television," he insisted.
Bargues is convinced that the difficulties currently experienced by cable TV operators in the US (where hundreds of thousands of viewers have cancelled their subscriptions during the past year in a phenomenon described as cord-cutting) have little to do with the millions of customers that have in turn signed up with Netflix, the pioneering OTT service provider.
"We are sure that phenomenon responds more to the dire economic situation currently affecting the US than to a competition problem posed by the OTT sector," said Bargues.