LatAm_latam 12/07/2013 17:57 Page 3
LatAm football rights score record prices
T
he cost of broadcast rights for Latin America’s six strongest FirstDivision football leagues has surpassed the $1 billion mark for the first time in the region’s history. Research carried out by Dataxis showed that the main domestic professional soccer competitions organised by the local federations of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru attracted a combined $1.07 billion in TV revenues in 2012 – up by over 56% compared with 2011. “Different local federations and professional football associations are currently experimenting with different business models to commercialise broadcast rights in Latin America,” said Juan Pablo Conti, senior analyst at Dataxis and author of the report. “However, regardless of the approach they have been adopt-
ing, they have all been increasingly successful in making their margins grow.” Broadcast rights for the ‘Brasileirao’, Brazil’s domestic First Division football league, were easily Latin America’s most expensive, worth over $610m in 2012 and accounting for nearly 57% of the regional total. The Dataxis report - Soccer
broadcast rights and sports TV channels in Latin America 2013 also found that there were a total of 116 different dedicated TV channels broadcasting sports programming in Latin America’s seven main TV markets at the end of 2012. High-definition sports TV networks were fast gaining space in the channel line-ups of all of the large pay-TV operators.
Mexico was the country exhibiting the largest number of HD sports channels in the region (12), followed by Colombia (8) and Chile (7). Argentina (with DeporTV), Brazil (Esporte Interativo) and Venezuela (Meridiano TV) were the only countries to have a FTA sports TV channel – which in the cases of Esporte Interactivo and Meridiano TV were also carried by some of the local pay-TV operators. The first two over-the-top (OTT) sports video services to launch in Latin America (both in the Second Half of 2012) were operating in Brazil and Chile. In Brazil Esporte Interativo Plus was offering a subscription-based service featuring live coverage of multiple sports, in Chile Estadio CDF was exclusively dedicated to football.
Uruguay's TCC goes OTT with Broadpeak
Broadpeak, a provider of content delivery network (CDN) technologies and video-ondemand (VOD) servers for cable, IPTV, OTT, and hybrid TV operators worldwide has confirmed that Uruguayan cable operator TCC has selected its BkM100 Mediator unified CDN manager, BkS300 multiformat streaming video server, and BkS400 HTTP video cache server, its new OTT service. TCC can now cost-effectively deliver live and VOD content OTT to subscribers while ensuring a high quality of service. “Partnering with Broadpeak will allow us to meet the growing consumer demand for a high-quality OTT view-
ing experience on any device,” said Javier Ruete, CEO, TCC. “Broadpeak's CDN technologies provide us with the most efficient and costeffective solution for delivering our video content while optimising network and storage resources. Leveraging the flexibility offered by Broadpeak solutions, we can easily add catch-up TV, analytics, and wholesale CDN features to enhance the OTT service.” “Expanding its digital cable service offering to include OTT content puts TCC at a competitive advantage in the pay-TV marketplace,” said Jacques Le Mancq, CEO, Broadpeak. “Broadpeak's video streaming technologies dramatically reduce an operator's capital
and operating expenses as they face an ever-increasing pressure to deliver more content to more devices while maintaining an exceptional quality of service.”
head end solutions with major customers such as UPC, Irdeto and TDF.
httv expands to Argentina
Technology and solutions provider for interactive digital TV httv has opened a new office in Buenos Aires to address the South America region and to develop further httv’s business. Romain Moyne will be in charge of httv’s sales operations in the area. Moyne comes from httv’s head-quarters in Meylan, France where he managed the deployments of httv’s “We are moving into an important phase of our growth as a global company and our new sales office abroad are critically important to build on the success that has been achieved so far,” said Regis Saint Girons, CEO of httv. “Along with our continued investment in R&D, our new sales team will drive the implementation of our sales and distribution strategies to even greater