Marcelo Claure, faced with the challenge of unseating Netflix in the region

 The Bolivian executive will have to exploit 300,000 hours of content from TelevisaUnivision, in the future streaming platform that the company will launch.

At the beginning of February, Bolivian Marcelo Claure was announced as the vice president of TelevisaUnivision, the new company that was born from the merger between Televisa and Univision. A business in which the Mexican Televisa receives US$4,800 million, of which US$3,000 million would be in cash and the rest in shares, to become the majority shareholder, with a 45% stake in the nascent company.

The operation is also boosted by an investment of US$1 billion in shares purchased by SoftBank (a group in which Claure worked until mid-January 2022) and the current Univision investor, ForgeLight LLC. The executive is now part of a firm with tremendous potential that aims to conquer a market of 600 million Spanish speakers.

“TelevisaUnivision remains on track to launch, in 2022, its unified global streaming platform,” the company said in a statement issued at the end of January 2022. The new platform, the first large-scale one for the Spanish-speaking audience, aims to compete in the region with Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, Star +, Paramount + and Apple TV. To do this, you will have a free version and a premium version.

Televisa already tried something similar with its Blim platform in 2016, but it failed miserably. The nostalgia strategy, based on 13,000 hours of content, did not help him and as much as he tried to bring content like Cuna de Lobos to new generations, it did not work for him either.

In three years, the company relaunched the service under the name of Blim TV and added more than 30 live television channels to its content. In addition to the channels of Televisa Networks, Telemundo Internacional and Televisión Española. However, inside Televisa they know that the days of the platform are numbered.

One of Claure's tasks will be to exploit on the new platform the 300,000 hours of content available to TelevisaUnivision, as well as Televisa's four transmission channels, 27 pay television channels, the Videocine movie studio and the Univision and UniMás broadcast, nine Spanish-language cable networks, 59 TV stations, 57 radio stations and the PrendeTV AVOD platform.

"There are so many things to do I don't know where to start," Claure tweeted last week.

complex task

The competition that Claure will have to face will be tough, especially against Netflix. And it is that, in Latin America, Netflix, according to data from Statista, has 37.54 million paying users, a figure that represents 18.43% of its global subscribers. In the last two years, Netflix added 11.46 million new users; that is, 24.56% more than the number of new incorporations in the US and Canada.

Although the region is the one that generates the lowest average monthly income for the platform, with an average of US$7.12 per client, income from 2018 to 2020 grew by 35.65%, much more than services that they have money for content and a closed ecosystem closer to this type of audience, as is the case with Apple TV+.

Apple TV+ is an example of the challenge that TelevisaUnivision will face, since it is a company with money to invest in content, with a closed and faithful ecosystem that has not been able to convince users who demand content such as that available on Netflix or Disney +, according to experts.