EconomyFinancial"We want to be the platform where more people...

"We want to be the platform where more people consume video on demand"

The ‘subscription fatigue’ will reach Mexicans. In the coming years, local users – as they are already experiencing in the United States and some European countries – are going to feel burdened by having to pay for so many content services online.

According to Verizon Media, this phenomenon will experience a growth of 17% globally in the next four years. While from the consulting firm Kantar they assure that the trend has already put 52% of users in the world to think, who have begun to cancel subscriptions.

In Mexico it is not yet an important phenomenon, but it will come, which will boost companies that offer free online content services with advertising. “Content is king, people decide which platform to pay for, but not many will be paying for five, six or seven platforms talking about video, to that we must add music and entertainment”, explains Luis Arvizu, CEO of the platform of streaming Blim TV.

In addition, says the executive, in countries like Mexico there are a large number of users who are looking for content that is generated from the beginning in Spanish, and that is specifically designed for the local audience. “This is going to speed up the process,” he says.

Under this line, Blim TV launched an AVOD (Advertising Video On Demand) version of its platform, which consists of more than 14,000 hours of content that the user can enjoy for free, but with advertising, as is now the case with traditional television.

This change in the business model has a purpose: “Our goal is to be the platform where more people consume video on demand legally,” says Arvizu.

Expansión: Why did you decide to go for a free and ad-supported offer from Blim TV?
Luis Arvizu: When I joined the company (in July 2020), one of the first plans we made was to see if a different model than the one we currently have from SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) could work for Blim TV, we started to review what was the demand for Televisa content digitally and we saw that it really is gigantic, people want to consume the complete content for free. When we put a few on social platforms, we saw the amount of people and hours that were consumed, we did the analyzes and we understood that an advertising-based model made a lot of sense. With this we got to work and build the whole product in which people can see free, complete content and with a good OTT platform experience, only with advertising. And for people who do not want to have ads, there is the other subscription model where they can make profiles and download content to see it offline .

E: What is the estimated number of users you plan to attract with this new offer?
LA: I can tell you that today, literally, there are hundreds of millions of people in Latin America who consume Televisa content. We think that within this model in a very short time we will be the most used OTT in Mexico, there will be more people consuming the content that we will have on Blim TV than in any other video on demand service that exists in the market. We started with the soft launch (pilot launch) in mid-May, this week we made the official communication that the service exists, and we already have hundreds of thousands of users using it. We didn’t want it to be many, it was a totally new service and we wanted to make sure that all the experience and the technical part was working well. Right now it is perfect. We hope that very soon we can talk about millions of users.

E: Could there be a reduction in subscriptions in the paid service?
LA: Obviously there will be a lot of people on subscription saying, ‘You know what? For me, the experience I have now is enough. ‘ Yes, we know that some are going to change and the truth is that moving from the premium part to the basic part is easy or the other way around, but we also think that we have the other effect, it means that there will be many people who from the beginning knew that It was a paid service and he did not go to Blim TV to see what was being offered and, now, with the free experience, he will find out what all those contents are that can be found if he had the Premium. It is a lot of new people who did not enter before, who are going to start with the free service and then go to the subscription service for this reason, in addition to that they will prefer to have the experience without ads. We think that the final number is going to be positive. What we have seen since May is that the subscription part is actually growing even more, much more than the people who are leaving the subscription to go to the free part.

E: Will Blim TV offer original content to users?
LA: Not for this year, this year we greatly increased the intake capacity, which is all those thousands of hours that get new. Now we have much more content that is available to put on the platform, which means that it is enough even for the next year. We already have that content in our hands, we just have to prepare it to upload it. It does not mean that for the following year I could not change this and that we do seek to make original content. For now we have many content that can only be viewed within Blim TV, they are available on no other platform.

E: Regarding brands, why should they advertise on Blim TV?
LA: At the advertising level, we all know where the investment is going, it is no secret that digital advertising has gained ground and today it is destined more to the online world. Now, within this medium, growth is towards investment in video format, in Mexico it is growing faster. Lately a lot of this capital goes to OTT platforms for many reasons, some of them are that they combine all the good television experience with the digital part, people see your video or your ad on a full screen, with the sound on, with much more attention that a news item could have, for example, with the assurance that it is curated content and there will be no violence or hate messages as in other social platforms, with the guarantee that the content was viewed complete and that it will only be human beings those who visualize it. It is an offer that, from the point of view of the advertiser, is much better than any other that I can find in the market.

E: What are the plans for the company in Latin America?
LA: We are already available in 18 countries in the region, users of those places can have all the experience both subscription and free. Much of what we are changing at Blim TV is that last year there was a lot of focus on growing the content exclusively for Mexico, they wanted it to have the rights for the country and if an additional one came, it was already a profit, today we are actively making sure that all the Platform contents, to the extent possible, are available in all Latin American countries. Everything else is the same, they have the same experience.

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