Colombia. La Curacao is one of the companies with the longest experience in the distribution of broadcast technology in Colombia. Its director, Carlos Cuadros, spoke with TVyVideo+Radio about the trends in the country and the recovery of the market after the pandemic.
He pointed out that "In our case we have noticed a high trend in large-format visualization solutions associated with virtual reality and augmented reality to generate differentiating productions of excellent quality, in addition to all AI-supported solutions that provide inputs for greater automation in repetitive tasks."
Other areas of interest, and of which he expects to find more developments at NAB Show 2023, are cloud solutions, as well as the advance in remote productions and their respective global adoption, which allows the reduction of costs to motivate their massification.
When asked about the market last year and how much it has recovered after the pandemic, Carlos Cuadros said that "we finally managed to have very close results on average to the other years, with which and in the face of the uncertainties of 2022, such as the macroeconomic situation of Colombia and politics, plus the global situation, we could conclude that the result is acceptable".
He added that the recovery from the pandemic has been slow. "We do not feel it yet, because the pandemic also resulted in the strengthening of the technological transformation cycle of customers in general with more competitive solutions favoring lighter investments than traditional ones."
The 2022 results were also impacted by product shortages. For La Curacao this situation was quite traumatic and prevented the normal dynamics in the expected investments, especially in the government sector. Today, said Carlos Cuadros, in some products it still persists with notorious delay despite the efforts of the manufacturers.
Finally, he stressed that one of his most recent integrations was the project of production and management of audiovisual content in the government sector, which corresponded to the Special Justice for Peace, JEP. And for this year they expect to activate technological renewal projects of some channels in the production chapter, as well as the eventual strengthening of the migration from baseband to IP.
