Albavision is one of the largest Latin American TV networks and has nearly 30 channels across all of the region’s major markets. The company has been going for over 60 years and was founded in 1948 in Guatamala. Juan Pablo Alviz, CTO, Albavision talks about the next step’s for one of the region’s major broadcasters.

VIA SATELLITE: What are the major challenges for Albavision over the next 12 months? Has the global economic recession had an impact on advertising revenues? What do you see as the main growth drivers for your business?

Alviz: We are closely following the development of some markets and technologies related with the way the content is delivered to the end users. As FTA broadcasters, our major challenge is the transition to the digital broadcast technology in most of the countries. Satellite content delivery is becoming one of the major points of interest. We use satellite distribution to send the programming from the studios to the different transmission sites, and the standard majorly adopted in Latin America, uses a different transport stream algorithm with major changes to the current DVB-ASI. That transport stream is called BTS, Broadcast Transfer Stream, and we have to deal now with the technologies at the transmission sites to deliver the content both to the analog television and digital television transmitters. New re-multiplexers must be installed to be able to meet the specifications of the ISDB-Tb standard.
   Other than the technical challenges, the economic recession has not impacted our region. Some political issues in certain countries, however, have contributed to a reduction in revenues. However, the main growth drivers continue being the quality of the content that you produce or distribute. The survival guide for FTA television has as the main component the content, both locally produced or acquired internationally. Although HD is a driver, the content itself continues as the main motivator for investments.

VIA SATELLITE: What are your plans in terms of producing more content in HD? Will you need more satellite capacity over the next year?

Alviz: We are producing local content in HD in all our affiliates around the region, but only broadcasting it in Argentina, Perú, Costa Rica and Guatemala through our terrestrial digital transmission networks and cable operators. With the current offer both in equipment and storage, today is more feasible to produce content in HD than SD, if you are obligated to make a technology change for obsolescence or new investments. We will be obligated to increase our satellite capacity during the following years to expand our HD content distribution to the different regions of the countries where we have presence. Grupo ATV Perú is the only affiliate delivering HD content in our satellite feed with Intelsat.

VIA SATELLITE: How do you view the OTT opportunity for Albavision? How will players such as NetFlix and Hulu influence the broader pay-TV market?

Alviz: Yes, that is impacting the market right now. We produce a lot of local content and I consider local TV as a very important portion of the business model for OTT. Content rights is the key to succeed to any business model in the multimedia business. We will see regular broadcasters more involved in the smart TV and the OTT business due its current control over the premium content. The long experience producing content from the broadcast industry is something that will not be easy to achieve for telecommunication companies. That is a business where costs control is the real “know how” to be able to compete in that market. Netflix, Hulu and similar players, would be obligated in the near future with the broadcasters to access the relevant content to the region.

VIA SATELLITE: As we enter a more fragmented media environment than ever before, what do you see as the major challenges for a major broadcaster to stay relevant in this new media environment? Do you believe that Albavision has been ahead of the game in adapting to this new environment?

Alviz: The challenge is to keep the audience and the ratings. We have to be on smartphones and tablets. Albavision has a complete tapeless operation, which will allow us to migrate to any platform in a smooth way. TuTeve, our portal in Perú for Internet and SmartTV, is our pilot program, and we have been gaining a lot of experience during the past two years understanding the market, and our customers and advertisers needs.

VIA SATELLITE: What is the next phase of Albavision’s growth strategy? Are you looking to launch new channels?

Alviz: We keep our commitment to the FTA model. We continue affiliating more stations in the region, and launching new channels with different segmented contents. For example, we now have available 24 hour news channels in Peru and Guatemala, using UHF frequencies. We have also recently launched a 24 hours sports channel in Guatemala.

VIA SATELLITE: Could you tell us about any major initiatives that Albavision is working on in terms of the delivery of content in Latin America?

Alviz: Albavision owns and operates its own satellite content delivery platform for more than five years. We are multicasting to our affiliate stations more than 50 hours per day of programming in digital files. We have in operation a Hughes VSAT system in C-band, with coverage all over Latin America, on Intelsat 805. Also, we have been using Kencast as our main content delivery platform for years with great support and reliability. Most of the content we acquired is received in our lab in Miami, both on tapes or files, processed and delivered into the facilities with transmission rights. We have been also sending content via opportunistic usage of Internet, but this is still an expensive channel to use in certain countries of Latin America. With the release of the encoders and modulation schemes, we are always looking to optimize the bandwidth to allocate more content and improve quality. The HD content delivery as files through any platform is still a challenge due the size of such files. However, we are currently testing new techniques to be able to process the massive distribution of HD content during the next years. It is very important that the content providers rapidly migrate to a file based distribution. That will reduce big efforts that we are still doing digitizing hours of content in our facilities to send them through our platform.