With consumers in the region now increasingly choosing to have premium video services, an opportunity has opened for service providers in Latin America to leverage their scale and customer data to deliver a truly personalized experience, while also creating a new revenue opportunity via content monetization.

Premium video competition is taking off in Latin America

According to Digital TV Research, less than five million new pay TV subscribers are expected between 2017 and 2023 in the region. Moreover, pay TV sales are predicated to stall at 44% of current TV households, while revenues will fall through 2019 before starting to recover.

Already today, almost eight in ten connected households regularly use online and premium video services, while 67 percent of consumers who have had their pay TV service for four years or more subscribe to one.

So what does this mean for service providers?

Bringing intelligence to content

The main challenge for service providers in this crowded content environment is to help consumers discover the most relevant content across services, while also monetizing the experience. With large amounts of metadata available, it’s not impractical to think service providers can leverage various data sources to create a unique, personalized profile with recommendations for individual users. This can go one step further than premium video services, as customer data can go beyond just what content users like and dislike, leveraging select personal information (ads that resonate, website history, etc.) with a user’s consent first.

Beyond the importance of recommendations and being a super aggregator that pulls together many different premium services based on the customer’s viewing habits, time of day or even time of year, understanding the customer is the holy grail for these service providers. In fact, it is especially important, as premium video services continue to gain popularity in the region, to have these insights to outsmart the competition and win consumers’ hearts and of minds.

Better relationships with content creators

To truly move beyond the current pay TV landscape, service providers in Latin America need to develop better direct relationships with content creators, as well as insights and analytics to further expand their wallet share. While many do have relationships and tools, it’s my opinion that they are more informal, ad hoc and lack a holistic common strategic goal. Ensuring an ecosystem is in place and bringing in the proper talent that have key content relationships will therefore be key in the challenge to extract maximum business value from the content opportunity.

Overall, the goal will always be to give consumers the best possible content experience. For this reason, I believe the areas we raised above should be the first to focus on to make the most of our evolving content landscape. Do you agree?

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