SKY talks about piracy challenges, streaming, transmission center and more! TC Interview

2023-10-26 16:33:00

As part of the VI World Youth Meeting, an event organized by Scholas Ocurrentes and World ORT, to celebrate diversity, exchange experiences and debate themes to transform their communities in favor of a fairer and more equal world, young people from different countries around the world world had the chance to visit the SKY Transmission Center in Jaguariúna, São Paulo, where they were able to discover more about the structure behind the operator’s services, as well as the reception, condensation and retransmission process.

TudoCelular was one of the few vehicles to cover the visit, where we were also able to check out more details about the facilities, as well as chat with Gustavo Fonseca, president of SKY. During our conversation with the executive, we discussed topics such as the difficulties faced by Pay TV Operators in relation to piracy and streaming platforms, as well as learning a little more about the Transmission Center itself.

Piracy is a huge problem.

Everyone asks me which competitor I’m most afraid of. My number one competitor is piracy.

I’m working with all the partners we have and with my competitors to see how we can reduce this.

Two months ago, I was in Brasília, during the launch of the Anatel laboratory, which is helping, because they are disconnecting a lot of these pirate boxes.

I would like to see the retail and electronic retail and social media industries getting involved in this fight too, because today we still see, in abundance, the sale of pirated devices on the most famous websites in Brazil. This, in theory, should not be possible.

I have an important part of my time dedicated to how we are going to prevent piracy. It’s a problem.

People have normalized you having a pirated device at home that “has all the signs.” If we take this into the second derivative of the problem, we will stop having audiovisual production in Brazil, because you imagine a scenario in which everyone pirates everything.

If everyone pirates everything and no one pays for the content, there will be no content production in Brazil. There will be content production where the industry is defended, like the United States. So we will be increasingly at the mercy of what content is produced outside Brazil.

Even from a cultural point of view for the country, it is a very serious issue. Piracy is not just an issue of currency evasion or job losses. It’s just that there will actually be less cultural production in Brazil.

A problem beyond SKY’s domains

Two-thirds of homes in Brazil already have an internet connection. This is given on the screen.

These two thirds are closer. It turns out that SKY doesn’t just operate for two thirds of the country, it operates for the entire country.

So this third that is not connected yet, we have a lot of protagonism. And in those two thirds that are connected, we face piracy every day.

Me, my competitors, the broadcasters in Brazil. I talk to people from SBT, Record, Globo, Band. They are also being pirated.

The first step is to have a version of the application that works on the operating system, and that it is available in the store for that system in question.

Then, it’s a commercial agreement to give visibility, to bring it to the top of the shelf. We have already had some agreements, some were better, others worse.

We constantly look for opportunities: for example, a button on the device’s remote control, it’s also interesting to have the logo on the box, all these things.

But our number one concern is being on all operating systems. And not only be in all operating systems, but also in versions, which is another derivative of the problem.

‘Ah, I have Tizen here’, but if you have a very old Tizen it won’t necessarily work. So, the first focus is on that.

Now, having more or less visibility there depends on commercial agreements, of which we have already had many, with Roku, for example,
We had something with Samsung, but it’s not necessarily present in our strategy all the time.

The bulk of our consumption is on the big screen, where the limitations of the mobile network are less relevant. What we see is…

There is marginal consumption on tablets with a cellular network, a consumption of just a few minutes.

We’ve never had any complaints from our customers, we don’t have massive complaints on this topic.

What we see is that the customer at the end has learned to watch video connected to Wi-Fi. The customer at the end of all social classes, from all parts of Brazil, follows.

If he is on 4G or 5G and starts to see that he is going to consume a lot of video, he tries to go to a nearby Wi-Fi.

For us it was not a limitation. Now, the experience I have, for example, I travel a lot in São Paulo with 5G, is spectacular.

The truth is that in mobile networks today, quotas are increasingly larger. I think they can handle a lot of video.

Again, I think the customer at the end learned that he needs to go look for a Wi-Fi network to download there.

This entire building here, imagine, is a sandwich maker.

Each layer of the sandwich comes from somewhere. There is a lot that arrives via fiber and there is a lot that arrives via satellite.

So you will look outside, you will see that there is a large, medium and small antenna. The averages are usually the antennas that receive the signal from the programmers’ satellite, for example, which will also fill the sandwich. The big ones are the ones that transmit.

We bring all the ingredients for the sandwich, do the multiplexing here and then throw it on the big antenna and transmit it.

DGO is also done here. We use many of the infrastructures that we use to make the “sandwich”…

A lot of the multiplexing that we do for DTH we also do for OTT here. But we operate OTT throughout Latin America here.

So we also bring signals from other countries here to mix the signal here. And then you are connecting.

We have other transmission centers that carry the CDNs in other countries, but we have a fiber connection with our main content exchange points.

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