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Although the cable and satellite television segments continue to grow, Mexico is expected to be the next OTT leader in Latin America. Over the Top (OTT) platforms in Mexico are forecasted to increase at an annual rate of 17.9%, from $549 million in 2018 to almost $1,300 million in 2023. Mexico is expected to overtake Brazil as the largest OTT market in Latin America in 2022.
OTT services in Mexico have increased dramatically in recent years. According to PwC (an American consulting firm) revenues from OTT platforms in Mexico will grow 11.2% per year.
Mexico is a big market for content consumption. Spotify is the platform with the largest number of users in the country with 89.1% of the market share. Apple Music, Google Play, and YouTube Music, despite offering larger music libraries, have not made significant gains.
Why the border is important for Mexican networks
See the value of a PoP on the borderNetflix arrived in Mexico in 2011 and at that time the company only had 25 million users in the U.S. and Canada. By 2017, it also became the preferred platform for Mexicans to stream content gaining 8.3 million subscriptions throughout the country – an 80.8% share of the market.
The CIU, a strategic consultancy firm, reports that the closest competitor to Netflix in Mexico is Claro Video – which arrived in Mexico in 2012 and currently has a 14.6% market share. Blim falls in third place – the company launched in 2016 without much fanfare. Almost four years later, the Televisa company continues with only a 2.7% market share.
Then there is HBO Go, which arrived in Mexico in 2010, but became necessary to have as a service by television companies operating in Mexico like Dish or Sky. In June of 2017, it became possible to access the platform, but despite the content offered (the star being Game of Thrones), HBO Go has only 1.5% of the market share.
It is important to point out that these companies are not the only ones that have wanted to enter the country. There are more competitors, but only the companies listed provide the necessary data.
Streaming giant, Amazon Prime Video, opted to provide original content in Mexico. The CIU predicts that the competition between these and others will increase steadily.
How to get closer to OTT content providers
Some carriers believe that the caching servers of content providers such as Netflix or Disney + are sufficient to meet user demand, but not only do they provide content. In some cases, content providers do not have their own distribution networks and use CDNs to deliver their content to areas or points in the world where they do not have a presence or way to deliver their content directly to operators.
The CDNs (Content Delivery Network) are a network of servers in different data centers around the world. They are used to quickly and cost-effectively deliver a wide variety of content.
Success stories at the border include the main presence of Limelight, Akamai, AWS, and Cloudflare. These CDNs are successfully covering most of Mexico and are unloading Dallas with a point of presence in McAllen and within Mexico. Some important information about these CDNs:
- Cloudflare delivers 15% -30% of Internet traffic.
- Akamai has more than 20 million domains on its network.
- Limelight, with +40 Tbps of traffic capacity on your network.
These CDNs deliver content from the following platforms: Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Fox, Spotify, Slack, Uber, Adobe, Universal, Disney +, among others.
Learn more about CDNs and peering with Alejandra Moreno
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