In a move that it says will democratise the online video and video-on-demand sectors in the country and bring its media into the 21st century, Argentina’s Federal System of Public Media and Content has launched a new over-the-top video service, Contar.
Named after an amalgamation of the words content and Argentina, Contar was launched right at the end of the recent NextTV conference in Buenos Aires and will offer on an over OTT basis VOD services plus live channels covering education, sports and entertainment. These include TV Pública, Paka Paka, DeporTV and Encuentro as well as a number of public channels from across the Argentinean provinces. In addressing the bandwidth issues that people in the latter typically encounter, Contar will adapt the quality of its output to the local networks it runs on.
The initial library on content contains 2,000 items and there would be “quite a lot of new channels added every month,” revealed Fernanda Rotondaro, content director of the public content secretariat of the federal public media system in Argentina. Rotondaro added that her office had been working on the Contar project for two years with the express intention of providing a 360-degree multi-platform service that adapted to the capacity of the leading media groups in the country.
The service is geo-locked and any returns it makes will be re-invested into new content. Crucially, Contar will offer live streaming access to football from the forthcoming World Cup in Russia.