Ahead of NAB 2025, which starts next month, our VP of business development for the Americas, Carlos Ramos, gives us his thoughts on how the industry is evolving on both parts of the continent.
Summary
- Latin America's media and entertainment industry is projected to grow significantly, with an anticipated increase of 9.4% by 2025, driven primarily by streaming video revenues expected to reach $24 billion.
- Operators in LATAM are increasingly prioritizing stable, proven technology partners for video services, emphasizing long-term stability and solid financial backing amidst market turbulence. -
- In North America, traditional cable providers face competition from agile smaller companies, which are seeking integrated solutions for video services, reflecting a shift towards centralized management systems like Apple TV.
- The demand for integrated news services in streaming platforms is growing, as companies aim to enhance local community engagement, while the interest in AI for data analytics and content recommendations is on the rise across the continent.
A time of growth
Last year, NAB had a strong international presence, with 27% of the total 61,000+ attendees coming from outside the United States. NAB doesn’t publicly go into further geographic detail, but it’s a good bet that many of those 16,470 attendees are journeying up from LATAM.
The industry in Latin America is growing fast; certainly faster than the US market currently is. According to data from Omdia, Latin America’s media and entertainment industry is projected to grow by 9.4% in 2025, reaching $55 billion. This significantly outpaces the 3.3% growth expected in the US over the same period, and even outstrips the 6% global average.
Neearly half of the LATAM revenues will come from streaming video, which is forecast to reach $24 billion in 2025. Traditional linear TV will account for $20bn, with the remainder spread across games, music, and cinema. Hotspots include FAST revenues, which will climb from $231 million in 2024 to $569 million by 2029, driven in the main by Brazil.
Beyond the bare statistics, in talking to our customers in both North and South America there are some definite trends that we can identify.
Key trends North & South
The inclusion of video services remains one of the key components for operators’ success In LATAM, while effective streaming options are also seen as critical for broadcasters. In some cases, the technology companies providing these services have been forced out of the market recently, leading to a rush towards stable companies with a proven track record and a solid financial backing.
Companies are now paying close attention to their due diligence as a result of this market turbulence, focusing not only on the latest technology being offered to them but the commercial provenance of the companies involved. Long-term stability is being prized over short-term gain.
We are also seeing an increasing demand for integration with the big USA-based streaming services. Netflix has been a constant requirement for some time now, but services increasingly need to expand their aggregated offerings to include those from Amazon, Paramount, NBCU, and more to satisfy viewer demand.
The picture in North America has a few subtle variations in it. Here, while the number of cord-cutters and even cord-nevers is increasing every year, the focus is still on traditional cable from the likes of AT&T and Bell. However, these enormous companies are increasingly being challenged by smaller, agile competitors who are laying their own fiber in neighborhoods and communities. They too recognize that offering their own video services is critical to success and are looking for an aggregated solution that coordinates content from different providers and apps. The trend is very much towards a centralized management system as exemplified by the likes of Apple TV.
One interesting requirement increasingly present in RFPs is that for news services. This is seen as a vital component for engaging with local communities and is a noted weakness in streaming services. Finding a way to integrate news web portals together with video platforms is actually becoming a holy grail for many companies.
In terms of individual technology sectors, there are several distinct trends emerging across the continent.
- Targeted advertising is gaining interest but there are commercial tensions between different stakeholders that all want a slice of the pie. Spend is increasing but it still feels like early days.
- Piracy remains a concern, especially in LATAM. There are efforts to curtail the problem, with Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil in particular recently taking actions against organized pirate groups. However, there is a lack of motivation from service providers to address the problem at the moment, as they try and offload the responsibility of any solution onto the sports leagues and federations.
- There is plenty of interest in AI, with companies exploring its potential especially with regards to its use in data analytics and its ability to offer more accurate content recommendations.
An optimistic future?
Talking to customers ahead of NAB 2025, there is plenty of optimism in the industry. There are challenges of course, there always are, but it seems there are already more people planning to head to Vegas this year than last. Hopefully the show will be a busy one for all sectors of the industry and not just the emerging creator economy as it was last year.
Where is the industry as a whole heading? Six years ago, in the run up to NAB 2019 I said that the set-top boxes in the market would be replaced by OTT-specific set-top boxes, most of which will be based on Android TV, and that all legacy broadcast boxes will disappear. That has yet to entirely happen, but we are well on the way.
So, what can we say about 2031 and six years in the future? I think that over the next five years, the industry will focus on integrations and ever-more personalized user interfaces. By 2031 the user will have detailed control over what they interact with, and more and more data will be funneled back to app owners for monetization purposes.
For now though, NAB 2025 is about broadcasters and operators finding stable providers that can take them through to 2031, replacing outdated systems, and looking for new platforms and technologies to improve stability, optimize efficiency, and reduce TCO. It’s going to be a fascinating show; hope to see you there.
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