Virtual Screenings 2020: always good news

Not only Linear TV and OTTs, but also technology players, retail chains, videogame developers and advertising agencies. So far, with just today to add, the event has joined 3700 participants, 6800 sessions (stays at the site) 50600 visits to exhibitor booths and 6500 screenings. It continues on 101 countries, but now 616 cities.

New buyers detected for the first time on Wednesday, have been Tatiana Olsak, Sr. Content Manager, Hulu (USA); Alina Cavendish, producer at Sony Russia; Daniel Solnicki, Head of Business Operations, Dreamworks Animation (USA); Miguel Ramos, Head of Programming, NOS (Portugal); Mustafa Alpay Guler, MD, Blutv (Turkey); Ivanna Rodriguez, programming coordinator, Imagen TV (Mexico); Spiros Profis, TV Content Specialist, Vodafone (Greece); Syahrizan Mansor, VP Brand, Nickelodeon Asia.

New types of buyers present? Natalia Hebel Neira, Business Development, Zeptolab, a videogame developer from Germany; José Echenique, owner of the Argentinean retailer iTech; telcos companies like Entel (Bolivia), Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan) and Movistar+ (Spain), among others.

What do the buyers want at VS? Margarida Pereira, director of acquisitions, TVI (Portugal): ‘Fiction and Entertainment formats for Free TV’. Cecilia Presto, Canal 10 (Uruguay): ‘Free tv, unscripted formats, series, soap operas, mini-series, biopics’.

Last trends about SVOD? 1) Amazon has historically taken less shows from the US than Netflix, but now is the only one to acquire new seasons of US shows for multi-market distribution. 2) StarzPlay has already started multi-market deals, taking content mainly from the US and UK. 3) India is one of the few territories where branding is not prominent. More of content acquisitions remain unbranded.

Everyday also, there are new graphics in this daily. It is very interesting to see the ‘Top sites per visits’, but this time separated by regions. The rankings are very different one to the other, just 6-7 brands appear in all, mostly US big ones. And it is sensible the strength of own local players each: In Americas the Latins lead with Hollywood; in Europe, US, Europeans and Turkish; in Asia, Turkish are mixed with Asian distributors on top.

Other new graphic is the one that shows the use of VS site per devices; in all the week days, 85% was by desktop and almost 15% by phones. But at the weekend, phones reached till 40%. Tablets, at least by this picture, are almost ‘out of order’, due to big smart phones.

About ‘Top sites per screenings’ and ‘Top screened contents’ pies on May 20, users have continued fragmenting their video consumption very much, as the previous day. On the former, just few big brands kept the lead, and many unusual ones took good positions in the ranking. On the latter, there are a lot of titles with similar percent of screenings, and almost 50% of total is taken by even smaller ones. Today is the last day of the market… enjoy it.

Nicolás Smirnoff, Fabricio Ferrara