Jornadas Ready to Deal With Pirate Connections

By Lucy Cohen

Argentina's premier cable TV gathering, Jornadas, will celebrate its 15th birthday from November 30-December 2, at the Sheraton Buenos Aires Hotel & Convention Center in Argentina. The annual international convention, organized by ATVC (Asociacion Argentina de Television Por Cable - Argentine Cable Television Association), has become the Southern Cone's major cable event, gathering cable operators from Argentina and Latin America as well as industry professionals, educators, public officers and cable industry and telecommunications' vendors. This year will be a year of celebrations, as ATVC celebrates its 25th anniversary at a private party on December 1.

ATVC is an organization dedicated to promoting little to mid-sized MSOs and SMEs. Founded in 1980 with the purpose of representing the Cable industry in Argentina, ATVC - as an industrial trade association - gathers Multiple System Operators (MSO's), independent cable operators, and provincial cable television associations, with their respective members.

This year's Jornadas exhibition space, which offers an area 17 percent larger than last year's, has already been sold out. In an effort to make the event more efficient, this year all conferences and activities will take place on the first floor of the Sheraton. All business rooms will be on the third floor. And since this is, after all, a Latin market, exhibitors and participants will get to sleep in a bit, (the floor doesn't open until 11 a.m.), and the floor will stay open until 7 p.m. Between meetings, participants can attend general interest conferences; the Premios ATVC Awards Ceremony (on Wednesday, November 30), which has already drawn a record number of applications - 418 from Argentina and Latin America; the ATVC Technical Conferences; the SCTE (Society of Cable Telecommunication Engineers, U.S.A.) Technical workshops (Thursday, December 1); or a TEPAL (Iberoamerican Pay Television Associations and Companies Organization) Board of Directors Meeting (Friday, Dec. 2).

Major focuses at the market, which is co-sponsored by CADiSSa (The Argentine Chamber of Satellite Signal Distributors), are engineering and hardware, with conferences highlighting all things technical. CADiSSa fosters research and development of signal distribution and television programs transported via satellite, and organizes meetings and conferences in which local and international experts provide information on common interest topics.

Jornadas is a particularly important convention because of Argentina's ever-evolving cable industry. Cable was first introduced to the country 42 years ago, thanks to a group of entrepreneurs who invested their own capital, without receiving any subsidies, in order to fulfill the unmet needs of the towns where they themselves resided. The cable industry emerged in small towns in Argentina, and it was only after many years that it became available in the large cities. Today, the service in rendered in about 1,200 towns.

Cable TV penetration has gone up and down in the country in the last five or so years, but the numbers still remain high. ATVC president Walter Burzaco pointed out that "nearly as many homes have access to cable as have access to telephones." But, Burzaco mentioned that in a country that has such a large penetration of cable TV, what happens to the service directly mirrors what is going on in the country. He mentioned that in 1998, the Argentinian cable TV industry was at its peak, with 5.5 million subscriber homes (out of a total 10 million homes). Then a recession began and the subscriber numbers fell in 2002 to 4.5 million homes. But, Burzaco said, subscription numbers have stopped falling and hopes are high for increased growth. Now, the numbers of cable TV households reside somewhere around 4.7 million. "In Argentina," Burzaco said, "cable has no franchising, and competition is allowed. The city of Buenos Aires alone has three cable operators."

Today, Argentina's cable TV industry is still dominated by private, commercial companies, which garner lots of competition. In fact, small and medium-sized companies cover 70 percent of the towns where cable TV operates. These are family-run businesses or companies with a small number of partners, established in the areas where they operate and committed to the development of their towns.

In August, there was good news for Argentina's independent SMEs and cablers. An amendment to section 45 of the Broadcasting Act was enacted. As part of the reform, congress excluded public utilities (such as telephone and electrical companies) from entering the broadcasting industry, ensuring competition among private players, a move ATVC president Burzaco called "wise."

He said, "If public utilities had been entitled to obtain licenses, current operators would have been discriminated [against] as a result of the competitive edges of these monopolies. SMEs would not be able to resist unfair competition and bundling. Cross subsidies, privileges, access to customers in dominant positions, constitute the actual discrimination which today, thanks to the right vision of lawmakers, has been limited," said Burzaco.

But all is not smooth sailing for the Argentinean cable industry. Burzaco pointed out that during the Argentina's recent recession (in 2001 and 2002), many users turned to illegal TV connections, and the industry now must face the challenge of getting subscribers to pay for something they have been accessing for free.

Burzaco mentioned that ATVC has started making TV available via cable modems, and that technology has gotten a good response. "We are now thinking of going digital, and operators are talking about IPTV rolling out next year," he said, a plan which should surely be a hot topic at this year's conference.