Octavio Florisbal

 

As one of the largest broadcasting companies in the world, TV Globo in Brazil faces a unique challenge: it wants to take advantage of all the advancements technology has to offer, but a large portion of its audience has little disposable income to spend on entertainment. Octavio Florisbal explains how TV Globo is catering to its viewers through digital television.

 

WS: How is TV Globo using new media?

FLORISBAL: We believe that mobile phones and digital television outside the home will drive digital growth in Brazil. If we look at mobile phones first, Brazilians adore talking on their cell phones and love changing their cell phones. In Brazil there are 160 million cell phones and we predict that in five to eight years these 160 million phone owners will be able to receive television for free, without paying anything. In the future, legislation will allow us to divide the digital bandwidth and to have a bandwidth solely for mobile phones with content specifically made for mobile phones, in a shorter format: one-, two- or three-minute segments of news, sports, entertainment or comedy.

We predict that this will be advertiser-supported because the Brazilian market is very receptive to this. TV for mobile phones will not have to go through telephone operators, and we will not need to do business with telcos because cell-phone owners will be able to get content directly over the air free of charge. And they will also get content directly from the Internet by entering our site.

We believe mobile phones will offer great growth opportunities for TV broadcasters because mobile content will be monetized and supported by advertising. The FIFA 2014 World Cup will be in Brazil, and we believe there will be 50 million or 60 million mobile phones that will be able to receive television. This will be a new path opened by digital television, principally for free TV.

 

WS: And what about digital television outside the home?

FLORISBAL: We are investing a lot in pilots and we are beginning to work with what we call “mobility.” We differentiate between “portability,” which are cell phones, and “mobility,” which is the TV content you see in taxis and in buses.

In São Paulo there are public-transportation buses carrying Globo programming in two ways: first, they receive it over the air, and second, they can get a recorded block—every day we record news, sports and entertainment, create a one-hour loop of programming and make it available to the buses. It’s not a big business, but it’s a way of demonstrating the importance of television outside of the home.

 

WS: And it helps to promote the channel.

FLORISBAL: Exactly. There are 30,000 buses in São Paulo, which is a huge quantity. In the future, all of them will be equipped with TV, so besides the business opportunities this provides, it helps promote our network, because we are showing promos about our programming.

 

WS: What are the chances of making money from the Internet?

FLORISBAL: We believe we can. In Brazil, online advertising is still growing. It has more or less a 4-percent share of total ad investments but it is growing 30 percent per year. We believe that in the next five to ten years it will reach a share of 8 percent to 10 percent and it will be a good business.

Here at Organizações Globo, we decided to change the company’s Internet strategy. We used to have an Internet company called Globo.com that produced all the online content, hosted the site and managed its distribution. In the past year there has been a change. Now all the content for the Internet—the ­programs from TV Globo, the news portals and sports coverage, entertainment programming—is created and produced here at our production facilities. Globo.com only provides the technology, the tools for interactivity, etc. And the proximity between creating and producing for the Internet and creating and producing for free TV facilitates the integration.

So today, in our entertainment programming, but even more in news and sports, we have a very significant integration between online content and the programming we air on our network. Consequently, our news portal is the leader online, our sports portal is the leader online and so is all our entertainment content. We are also leaders in online video.