Totalmovie to target users new to pay TV with combined live and SVOD service

Grupo Salinas-owned Latin American subscription video-on-demand service Totalmovie says it will launch what it describes as the world’s first combined live TV and subscription video-on-demand service in May, about a month later than had earlier been indicated.

Totalmovie will add two live channels from Salinas-owned TV Azteca as well as two BBC channels, Fashion TV, Extreme Sports and Rush to deliver a 10-channel bundle that will be available across Latin America, including Brazil, where Totalmovie has not yet been launched.

Speaking at the NAB Show yesterday on a session on Multi-Network Solutions in the Real World hosted by content security provider Verimatrix, Totalmovie CEO Robert Delamar said that the service of live channels and SVOD was not intended to compete with pay TV offerings but to provide an alternative that would appeal to viewers who had not yet been tempted by any pay service.

Delamar said that the main target market for the service would be mobile users. He said that people in Brazil had good access to 3G networks. He added that the service would also be available on connected TVs  and games consoles but that these devices represented a relatively small proportion of the overall target market.

Delamar said one of the keys to success for a service such as Totalmovie is to ensure that the billing relationship is through the mobile operator, or the service will miss most of its market.

Speaking more generally about the future of multiscreen distribution, Delamar said that it is important to target devices that consumers are actually using. “The PC is dead and the mobile internet is king,” he said.