The future of audiovisual content points to streaming platforms, which have changed consumption and the way programming is conceived. And although it is a highly competitive industry due to more and more players, Televisa and Univisión have decided to enter the segment through one of the first big bets since their merger: ViX, an application that will be totally focused on the Spanish-speaking public, with a free version of the same name, and a paid version, ViX+.
It is not the first time that Televisa and Univisión enter the world of streaming . In 2016, Emilio Azcárraga’s company launched Blim, which by 2020 had a market share of 1.9%, according to The CIU consulting firm; meanwhile, Univisión launched its own product last year, PrendeTv. However, both companies decided to unite their catalogs to consolidate and achieve a greater reach of Hispanic audiences, so their platforms will disappear when they migrate their content to ViX by consolidating as TelevisaUnivision.
For Pierluigui Gazzolo, president and chief transformation officer of TelevisaUnivision, given the great competition that exists in the on-demand content industry, companies that want to enter the market must look for spaces that have not yet been explored to differentiate themselves from others. For this reason, for the manager, the future of streaming lies in regionalization.
TelevisaUnivision wants ViX to be an example of this. The platform will focus on Spanish-speaking users, who make up a universe of 600 million people who, until now, in Gazzolo’s opinion, is an audience that has not been served and is eager to consume content in their language, but not only that , but also allows them to identify with the Latin American reality.
To achieve user identification with ViX content, which will be available for free on March 31 of this year, TelevisaUnivision will draw on the experience and knowledge that its open television audiences and its Blim platforms have left them and PrendeTv, in addition to a structure of which Televisa, Gazzolo assures, is an expert. For the director, the key to the success of the series that are currently seen on other platforms such as Netflix, Disney +, Paramount +, HBO Max, lies in the narrative of the novel, or, as he calls it: ‘series’.
“The format of the series, which we now call ‘serial’, has become a universal format. And this format was born here. If you see what the other competitors are doing in English, they are soap operas. In the end it is the soap opera formula, which was first made here; that is why the rest of the world associates as well in any language as a product of Televisa”, he explains.
One of the challenges that ViX faces is capturing the attention of young people, since it has been one of the segments of the population that television stations have had a hard time attracting. Juan Pablo Newman, Corporate Vice President of Operations and Profitability of TelevisaUnivision, explains that in order to bring young people closer to their platform, they will rely on diverse content, since this was the teaching left by the Televisa.com and Blim platforms, from where they managed to add young people to their subscriber base, who hope they will be the first to migrate to ViX.
Some of its proposals for this segment of the population will be the series of action and suspense “Fucking mummies”, live sports, Mexican and European soccer leagues, as well as the World Cup in Qatar, which will start on November 21 this year. . But from April 1, ViX will have the exclusive broadcast of the World Cup draw on its Zona TUDN channel, and with the broadcast of 40 matches accompanied by exclusive original content live from Qatar. Of these, 30 will be free to ViX, while 10 will be exclusive to ViX+, which will launch in the second half of the year.
In addition, the company also made alliances with production houses, such as Ventanarosa of actress Salma Hayek, and with 3Pas Studios, of Eugenio Derbez, as well as with July Moon Productions of actress and singer Selena Gómez, all Latin personalities.
Televisa estimates that in the first quarter of this year, the merger with Univisión will allow it to increase its financial income.
Advertising, the backbone of ViX
The advertising segment not many years ago was one of Televisa’s business pillars, but changes in consumption and marketing have complicated the sale of this product for the company, coupled with the fact that Covid-19 complicated the outlook, since its main consumer customers did without advertising to cut costs.
However, the reactivation of activities in 2021 helped Televisa, since in the fourth quarter of the year its advertising sales accumulated 7,103.2 million pesos, which represented an increase of 7.2% compared to 6,628.1 million in the same period of 2020, due to that its private sector clients sought to position their brands, products and services in front of consumers. In addition, its annual revenues from this segment increased 17.2%, a result that was driven by marketing activity.
With Vix the company seeks to take a greater boost, since its free version will be made up of advertising. Pablo Newman believes that the success of the advertising business will make use of artificial intelligence, which, based on an algorithm, allows knowing the tastes of the audience and thus inserting the correct advertising for each user. The information generated by the algorithm will be shared with its clients, but Newman promises that the data will be treated “as ethically as possible.”
“We can know if a user sees a type of content, which will allow us to know what kind of tastes or preferences they have to tell our clients where their advertising could go, and this translates into more sales for clients,” Newman said.
They will seek to broadcast worldwide
The idea of the directors is to turn ViX into a global platform. Its plan will be to consolidate itself in the first two in Spanish-speaking countries and in the United States, to later enter the Spanish market and later advance to other countries.
For companies, the content and soap operas that Televisa has produced have had significant acceptance in other non-Spanish-speaking countries, and the anecdotes prove it. There is the case of the Serbian metal group Fernando Colunga Ultimate Experience, who decided to name his band that way because their mothers watched the soap operas of the Televisa actor.
“This excites me, because we are going to be a global platform, but it will have to be done in steps. It is that the rest of the world associates as well in any language as a product of Televisa”, explains Gozzolo.
