During NexTV Series Argentina, Dario Oliver, general manager of Telpin, said that the cooperative will soon launch Sensa, the product developed by Colsecor that integrates linear TV and VOD. The executive participated in the panel called “TV challenges for South American Telcos” with speakers from Paraguay’s Copaco and Uruguay’s Antel.
Telpin started its IPTV development almost four years ago, together with a group of cooperatives gathered in Catel. “We have a typical offer with linear channels, more than 60 in HD, and we still do not have video on demand but we are going to launch Sensa soon, that product will be integrated into Telpin’s television offer,” Oliver said.
“We started (IPTV) over ADSL and we were incorporating FTTH so we have subscribers in both technologies. Obviously, fiber to the home allows us to develop a better TV service because we do not have the bandwidth restriction that the ADSL has,” he added.
According to Oliver, “linear TV is the driver” of the business, although he assured that “we should not get stuck in that model but to migrate towards new ways of watching television. You have to give people the chance to consume all the OTTs. We have to make everything available to our customers.”
Juan Carlos Benítez Zarate, Copaco’s commercial manager, said that the Paraguayan state-owned company began offering IPTV eight years ago, driven by the need to offer triple play packages. “Our network is mostly copper, now we are in a strong project to offer GPON FTTH,” he said. “We want to cover a large part of the city (Asunción) and take off with IPTV,” the executive added. Benítez also said that this year they plan to start offering VOD.
In turn, Pablo Moreira, manager of the Added Value and Multimedia Division of Antel, spoke about the company’s online services Vera TV and Vera+. According to the exevutive, Vera app already registered 1.5 million downloads, while Vera+ reached around one million. Moreira said that they are interested in collaborating with other providers, as they did with Netflix, to offer users the content they are looking for. Meanwhile, in June Vera+ will live-stream the 64 matches of the soccer world cup in Russia, in HD and 4K HDR.