Colombia. Almost 300 executives from the main companies related to the TV business, such as Caracol, RCN, RTVC, Claro, ETB and DirecTV finished the NexTV Summit Colombia 2015, the leading annual event on next-generation television. The executives revealed their online strategies through OTT (Over The Top) and TV Everywhere, a market whose subscriptions, according to organizer Dataxis, are growing in the country at a rate of 100% per year while traditional Pay-TV has slowed to only 4%, and showed their concern that companies like Netflix do not receive the same tax and regulatory treatment as local companies.
DirecTV, ETB and Claro complained to the ANTV authorities about the complex reporting processes they have to comply with while companies like Netflix do not even pay local taxes. OTT VOD (Video On Demand) services such as Netflix, Caracol Play and Clarovideo will add up to 800 thousand subscribers in Colombia by the end of the year according to Dataxis and more than one million eight hundred thousand at the end of 2018. To the complaint about the asymmetric treatment between local companies and Netflix were added the cable TV companies gathered in Asotic such as HV TV, Cable Bello or Multivisión that also participated in the two days of the NexTV Summit.
Meanwhile, each of them showed their strategies to enter the world of Internet TV (OTT) and availability in multiscreens (TV Everywhere). ETB has deployed fiber optic networks to homes and is committed to making agreements with OTT services, such as the one it made with Win Sports, to add them to the broadband subscription. Among them the HBO GO service. However, to prevent others from using its optical highway to transport TV, ETB only sells high speeds to those who hire their own TV service. Claro has launched its own OTT Clarovideo, DirecTV and RCN also brought its WinSports channel to the OTT model, Caracol fights the market with Caracol Play and RTVC is building its own portal, which will include the historical production of TV in Colombia.
Until last year, Colombia's subscription TV sector had one of the highest subscriber growth rates in Latin America. In 2010 it had increased 9.3%, in 2011, 11.4%; in 2012, 10.6% and in 2013, 8.5%. The sector began to slow down in 2014 with a rate of only 4.5% and in 2015 it would reach just above 4% to almost 5.1 million subscribers.
To cope with competition from OTT services such as Netflix, Pay-TV operators are also integrating and offering the various TV Everywhere tv channels such as Fox and ESPN to those who have the subscription of these channels. Thus, according to Dataxis, in the middle of 2015 ESPN Play and FOX Play had exceeded 4.7 million subscribers enabled, HBO GO 370 thousand and HOT GO (Playboy) 50 thousand in the country.
The panel of CTOs (technology directors), which is being held for the first time at the NexTV Summit, envisioned the future of services and showed that 4K content will be available first in OTT services than in traditional ones, and that next year with the Olympic Games there will be an explosion of sports content in ultra high definition that will promote the purchase of televisions.
