The new streaming economy: The digital transformation was the session held within the framework of the HCM Summit Series last Tuesday that included Isabel Rafferty Zavala, founder and CEO of Canela Media; Romina Rosado, EVP and general manager of Hispanic Streaming, NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises; René Santaella, EVP of Digital and Streaming Media of Estrella Media, Inc. and Rafael Urbina, General Manager and EVP of AVOD Streaming of TelevisaUnivision, Inc., and CEO of ViX. The panel was moderated by Stacie M. de Armas, SVP of Diverse Intelligence & Initiatives at Nielsen.
De Armas mentioned some interesting figures which give context the importance of the Hispanic market for the streaming area. She highlighted from the study “Latinos and the new streaming economy”, that this demographic has a content viewing power of 254 billion minutes per month (September 2021); Latinos represent 14% of all TV households and 16% of all Smart TV households; 55% of Latinos said that streaming platforms have the content more relevant to their identity group and Hispanics/Latinos spend 34% of their time streaming while non-Hispanic whites 25%.
When asked about the challenges of streaming in the Hispanic market, Santaella from Estrella Media said that the biggest is to achieve the right level of investment to engage effectively with the young audience, a segment that is growing. For Rosado of Telemundo the challenge is that not competing with each other but for the time of the audience and mentioned the difficulty of generating scale in this moment. Canela Media’s Rafferty agreed with Rosado about competing for time and noted that the Hispanic segment has additional complexities. “The challenge is how to properly serve them and provide them with a platform that they feel connected to,” Rafferty said.
For Urbina of TelevisaUnivision, the biggest challenge is how to tackle the consumer confusion regarding the diversity of streaming platforms and apps. TelevisaUnivision is super focused on creating scale in streaming, before talking about segmentation. “We are investing heavily in innovative formats for advertising, shoppables, interactive ads, which will be revealed during Upfront,” she said.
Rafferty stressed that she is delighted to see how “more and more of us are focusing on and better serving the Latino consumer. For her, it is key for a free streaming service to have an extensive content library. “We want to be the best option in the multicultural space for Latinos. Most of the growth no longer comes now only from the Mexican audience, but also from Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Venezuela, among others. Technology is giving power to streaming and streaming brings us data that is crucial for advertisers. Streaming must be used properly to improve the advertising experience. Metadata is not a good way to analyze the consumer, we must also take into account the audience emotions that the contents generates,” she pointed out.
Watch the session here