Mexico. In recent years, the telecommunications industry has moved to a scenario of better and more varied offer of services for consumers, the result of an accelerated evolution and technological convergence.
These changes have significantly increased the efficiency levels of networks in the provision of services.
In parallel, the industry has witnessed the emergence of new players that are the result of the reconfiguration of the competitive ecosystem. These include large technology and audiovisual content generation companies that take advantage of technological development and deployment of infrastructure for the distribution of audiovisual content through internet video platforms, for the creation of new models to meet the tastes and needs of people and for the development of new advertising schemes more specific to each type of audience.
There is a close relationship between the infrastructure and content sectors. The complementarity of both industries stems from the need of network operators to offer services that add value to their commercial offer and that of content creators to achieve the efficient distribution of their products. At the same time, the increase in costs associated with audiovisual productions makes it convenient to integrate both sectors to guarantee the financial viability of these projects and their subsequent positioning in the market in an era where content has become the currency to ensure audiences.
Faced with this new panorama, telecommunications network operators around the world have expressed their interest in strengthening their relations with companies producing and distributing audiovisual content with the aim of offering new offer schemes and value-added services.
In this sense, different strategies, including vertical integration in distribution and content creation, have been undertaken by these network operators to try to face technological giants such as Amazon, Facebook, Google or Netflix.
An early example of this trend in the industry was the 2013 acquisition of NBC Universal by Comcast, the U.S. market's leading fixed telecommunications company. To this example is added the approved merger between Time Warner and AT&T, resulting from a transaction valued at approximately $ 85,000 million dollars.
With the same objective, other operators have directed their efforts towards business strategies such as commercial alliances, billing agreements or integration of OTT platforms that allow them to offer their subscribers solutions tailored to their new habits of consumption of audiovisual content.
In the Ibero-American region, meanwhile, it is already possible to find different levels of rapprochement between operators, creators and distributors of content. These have resulted in the offer of innovative services that combine linear programming and live content with the flexibility and ubiquity of internet video platforms. Such is the example of Cablevisión Flow or the recent technological integration undertaken by Telefónica and Netflix. Additionally, billing agreements, zero-rating schemes and joint commercial offers between mobile operators and OTT platforms have proliferated in the main markets of the region.
The comprehensive offer of content and telecommunications infrastructure is continuously renewed and has the potential to further change the landscape of the industry, and will surely materialize new benefits for consumers in the form of attractive commercial offers, with greater diversity and quality of content.
Although this trend of integration is already visible in the various markets of the Ibero-American region, it is expected that in the medium and long term the new conditions will have an even greater and differentiable effect on the convergent supply of content and telecommunications.
In the OTI we consider that the authorization granted by the judiciary of the United States for the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, is part of an integrative trend and of profound and irreversible change, in which the large companies operators of television networks, telecommunications, and generators and distributors of content participate, that will surely bring the reconfiguration of markets, greater competition and the offer of services in better conditions of price and quality for the public.
Report prepared by the Ibero-American Telecommunications Organization, OTI.
