Tuesday, August 30th, 2016

The battle between lineal TV and streaming in Latin America

Jonathan Blum

In Latin America, TV viewers and prosumers have changed the way of watching and relating favorite content, to the extent that they have led two communication forms into an implicit confrontation: lineal TV (traditional) and streaming TV.

When we ask ourselves about the region’s outlook, we have to begin with the ‘macro’ aspects. Going through old data and forecasts, I came across this statement byu Zentih Optimedia, from last year: “Traditional TV remains the largest consumption form in media, but Internet consumption is making its way through.

Zooming into 2016: In March, Nielsen reported that 26% of its respondents are subscribed to streaming services such as Hulu, Netflix or Amazon; and the remaining 74% is subscribed to cable TV.

The outlook is similar in Latin America: one fifth of the respondents (21%) indicated that they are subscribed to a streaming TV service.   The following are some valuable ideas to sketch the confrontation between lineal TV and streaming TV:

Globally, 68% of the respondents say they have no intention to cancel their cable TV in order to replace it with a streaming service.

The report concludes that 24% of the users are not willing to give up traditional TV or cable TV.

These data may confirm that lineal TV is still largely rooted in households, and still serves the purposes of entertainment and informing; although the younger population looks for new stories, quality in the productions and innovative formats.

In conclusion, I may declare that lineal TV is, by far, winning this audience confrontation, and still holds the largest percentage in our region’s TV pie chart. Factors such as credit card access, loyalty to old TV formats, such as telenovelas, miniseries and the ‘remakes’ of awarded productions foster programming offering.

However, streaming captivates audiences with good purchasing power, allowing the user to interact with his/her favorite content almost in any way.  Also, technological companies satisfy the demand for new content, basing their productions on data provided by the users and data on their consumption habits, thus, there is no loss: only reputation gain and more audience.

All players in this confrontation for TV consumers have shown their strategies. Now, innovation, data analytics and quality must play for either side.