M+E Connections

Global media and entertainment data science company BB Media has put together a comparison of the United States and Latin America streaming markets, with the former seeing 77 percent of households watching movies, while 60 percent watch series, and the former having 89 percent watching movies vs. 81 percent for TV shows.

Latin-American consumers that have a Netflix account tend to choose American series, placing them in the top five of titles with the highest reach. According to SoDA LATAM by BB Media & Digital I, “Stranger Things” (watched by 25.4 million accounts), “Bridgerton” (19.9 million), “Cobra Kai” (17.6 million), “Manifest” (16.5 million) and “The Umbrella Academy” (16.4 million) are the Netflix shows from the United States that showed the highest reach in 2022 in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. The same goes for Amazon Prime Video users in this region, with the series “The Boys” (9.8 million), “The Good Doctor” (3.3 million), “The Office” (3.2 million), “This is Us” (2.6 million) and “How I Met Your Mother” (2.6 million) topping the rankings.

Among the most used devices by users in the United States to watch online content are smart TVs (69 percent), smartphones (51 percent) and computers (35 percent), which indicates that they usually prefer the comfort of home to consume such content.

In the case of Latin America, when users were asked about the preferred device, the most voted was the smart TV, with 48 percent, coinciding with the usage habits of the United States.

It is not surprising that the United States leads the ranking of countries with the highest number of streaming contents, as it has 469,000-plus titles across 228 platforms monitored by BB Media. A striking fact is that, of those titles, 44 percent are offered under an AVOD business model, being the most offered in the country. It should be noted that a title may appear under more than one business model, but this is still an important percentage when noting that 25 percent of the total titles fall under the SVOD model and 23 percent under the TVOD.

Focusing on productions from the United States, BB Media found that 48,000-plus titles from this country are available around the world. In this case, 18 percent are offered under an AVOD model, while the TVOD model appears on the scene with 29 percent of titles, and the SVOD with 27 percent. On the other hand, Americans can access 75,000-plus local titles, of which 62,800-plus correspond to films and 12,400-plus to series.

But when talking about regional streaming content, Latin America is one that garners interest for its growth. With 220,000-plus titles offered through 1,359 streaming platforms detected to date, just a year ago the region showed 134,000-plus monitored titles. Mexico (136,000 titles), Brazil (128,000 titles) and Argentina (120,000 titles) are the countries with the largest number of global content available, while the ranking changes when talking about local titles in the region: Brazil appears first with 5,500 titles, Mexico second with 4,800 and Argentina third with 2,400.