Nearing 1.5 million subs by 2018, Colombia's video-on-demand (VOD) market is clearly set to grow through the coming years from the current 260,000 subs.
New market operators and the infrastructure improvements to the country's telecoms will power the on-demand services growth.
According to the Colombian newspaper La República, the market scene was analysed during the Dataxis NexTV Summit Colombia & Andean 2014 held in Bogotá this week. The figures point to a business worth more than $300 million by 2018, while the current VOD market in Colombia is worth nearly $70 million.
However, as discussed during the summit, the VOD sector will not be a rival for traditional pay-TV and cable TV in the Caribbean country, which currently have almost five million subs.
“The country has first to grow on broadband and then the operators have to find the way of offering the content demanded by the customer with a sustainable prize,” said Arial Barlaro, Latin America's VP at Dataxis.
Colombia is, along with Argentina, the third-largest VOD market in Latin America, after Mexico and Brazil. As well as in the rest of the region, the business is clearly led by US operators such as Netflix, which in Colombia accounts for half of the VOD subs.
