Spain’s DTT has failed, says study

Iñaki Ferreras | 13-10-2012

TV consumption in Spanish households will grow in the coming months as a result of the increase in VAT in the leisure sector, but this consumption will be oriented in the medium term, towards payment for internet content and to more than to DTT, according to a study by ESADE Business School.

The study, which is based on in-depth interviews with 11 experts held between December 2011 and March 2012, concluded that "the current system has failed DTT by oversupply in content, audience fragmentation and the inability of providing interactive systems with the viewer."

For now, the study believes that a significant part of the demand for audiovisual content will move from film to television as a result of the VAT increase, so that the survival of cinema could be more related than ever with subsidies chains.

But the context, the report says, is "a storm of change" that will go further and affect key aspects like technology, content, viewers' habits, distribution and structure of management and large audiovisual groups. This transformation is taking place also in the midst of a strong economic crisis.

From this starting point, the study considers that, after the merger of Mediaset (with absorption of Four by Telecinco) and Antena 3 (which absorbed the Sixth), both groups will control 80% of television advertising.

But in a second scenario, the internet can emerge as global infrastructure for content distribution and thus replace DTT.

"Programmes, fiction and football rights may be acquired by global platforms like Apple, Google or Amazon," the report states. Together with this, "pay television provides an evolution of market growth" that could shift to advertising as a form of financing.

That is, market growth and the emergence of payment active customers can lead to the replacement of television as we know it, with the internet acting as a reference structure from which payment-open platforms would reach the viewer through many hits, fixed and mobile.

"This scenario would facilitate the merger between audiovisual media and written, in a much more focused way on content distribution platforms," ​​says the study.

Thus, the future hinges on three main factors: content generation, the customer relationship and the possible exploitation of their data, and finally, the different means of digital distribution.