Photo by AshTproductions/Shutterstock
By ERIK GRUENWEDEL
Source: www.mediaplaynews.com, June 2021
With 61 million people in the U.S., the Latino population is a major demographic group when it comes to media consumption. Latinos are spending less time watching TV in favor of streaming video, especially ad-supported VOD — the latter driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new data from Penthera.
Indeed, 46% of U.S. Latinos prefer consuming ad-supported VOD, followed by pay-TV (20%), ad-supported subscription VOD (16%), SVOD (14%) and live video (5%), according to a survey of 500 Latinos ages 18-50.
“Our audience has grown [three times] since the pandemic began,” Natalia Borges, EVP of marketing at VIX, a division of Univision Communications offering AVOD content to U.S. Latinos and consumers in Latin America. “We believe that the pandemic merely accelerated trends around cord-cutting that we were already seeing.”
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Penthera found that mobile is the most popular (55%) device for daily streaming, followed by the connected TV (51%) and PC (22%). Interestingly, 87% of mobile streamers do so in the home, followed by 26% outside the home; 23% when on a trip; 21% while commuting and 13% at work.
Another 88% of panelists said they experienced streaming video frustrations. The most common distractions are videos taking too long to start up (47%), video re-buffering (44%), and advertisements stalling (36%).
Notably, 61% of respondents said that they did not feel represented in the streaming ads they see, with 42% saying the issue is that the products being advertised aren’t local. That lack of representation affected panelists, who said the issue is that the products being sold aren’t local (42%); the ad is a translated version of its English counterpart (32%); their native language isn’t used enough (29%); and the actors in the ads aren’t Latino (24%).
FlixLatino, a SVOD service focused on making Hispanic-created and Latino-based movies, series, documentaries and animation, aims to fill the void.
“We had been doubling our subscriber base year-over year and we expected that to continue in 2020,” said Luis Guillermo Villanueva, the company’s COO. “With the pandemic, we saw our subscriber base triple last year. More Hispanic people in the U.S. were viewing more content.”
