Vubiquity: the aggregators take the scene

Adam Poulter, EVP y managing director, EMEA, LATAM & AsiaPAC, Vubiquity: ‘We provide operators with a full end-to-end solution: licensing, content delivery, subtitling, compliance, and a multiplatform storefront for their streaming services, so their customers can watch content wherever they are - that could be on their set-top box, laptop, tablet or mobile device’.
 
The global telco market continues to heat up and competition for customers is fierce. Operators, especially tier-2 and tier-3 telcos, will increasingly need to launch VOD services to effectively compete. Vubiquity is bringing VOD services to these operators at a disruptive price point. Post millennials or Generation Z are more commonly known as pure digital natives and have an expectation of multi device fluid viewing. Cloud based libraries are the backbone to facilitating these services and that’s one of Vubiquity’s core propositions.

Poulter: ‘Latin America's telco market is highly competitive and a well-established marketplace; and it will only get more increasingly complex. The marketplace is driven by strong branded OTT players like Netflix and local service providers like blim. Latin America also has a younger demographic profile than many other parts of the world, so online competition from OTT is even more intense’.

‘We partner with operators in the region to help them launch VOD and TVE services that will give them a competitive edge in the market, fend off competition from the global OTT platforms and create alternative programming line ups to provide compelling video services’.

‘As well as having an experienced team of people in the region ranging from Mexico City to Santiago to Sao Paolo and beyond, we have a deep knowledge of what consumers in the Latin American region like to watch from our many years of established data collection. We help operators to better understand their audience’s viewing habits so that we secure the right content, leveraging our deep relationships with the major global studios and niche, relevant, culturally appropriate local content producers’.

The executive says it works with a ‘broad portfolio’ of operators across diverse geographies from Mexico to Argentina to Chile, Brazil, Panama and beyond. ‘Some are the biggest operators in their regions, but in a number of instances we work with smaller mid-tier telcos too’, he adds.

‘We are a hugely ambitious company and have material plans to expand across the whole of Latin America within the next five years driven primarily behind increasingly agile streaming based and mobile services. That’s where the momentum is in the marketplace at the moment. Our solutions are insitu and providing services today, and we continue to want to work with ambitious operators. A good example of this would be our deployment of the OiPlay service. We also work with companies like VTR, Cablevision Argentina and Televisa, to name a few’.

‘We pride ourselves on our local intelligence. We are a global company with all the expertise and scale that you'd would expect to come with that, but we also have a fine-grained view of different markets and their needs. Latin America is particularly interesting right now because the telco and entertainment marketplace is going through a transformation. You have a young audience who not only want top-quality local content, but also the big Hollywood blockbusters. We are uniquely placed to help operators access that magic mix of content that will appeal to their consumers’.

‘They also want to be able to increasingly watch content not only on their TVs, but on their mobile devices too. We have the technology stack and are ready to onboard operators that want to launch these types of services. We are well-established in the region and work hard to respond effectively to challenges facing the market. For example, have robust protocols, sophisticated encryption workflows and geo-filtering technologies in place to tackle the difficulties presented by piracy and royalty recognition in the region’.

‘We intend to continue to be the market leader VOD services provider in the region. To do this, we plan to continue to work with operators who are being squeezed between the region’s biggest telcos and the OTT providers. They typically have more limited resources to build their own VOD platforms and are under more pressure from the global invasion of Netflix. We are uniquely placed to provision highly competitive programming line ups to make the formula for operators to bundle SVOD, and solve their problem at a price that can't be beaten’.

‘Vubiquity will also continue supporting video distributors of all sizes, and licensing award-winning, latest-release content that only we can access because of our deep roots in Hollywood and around the world’, concludes Poulter.