Carlos Slim Takes Aim at Netflix With Clarovideo Ron Buchanan - The Financial Times
go to original November 30, 2012

Trust Carlos Slim! Just when most of the rest of Mexico is preparing for Saturday’s inauguration of Enrique Peña Nieto as president, the world’s richest man has titillated the taste buds of a TV crazy nation.

Today, Slim’s América Móvil will launch in Mexico a Netflix-style service known as Clarovideo. Subscribers to Clarovideo – which is already underway in several other Latin American countries – will pay only about $5 a month, some two thirds the cost of Netflix.

A relative lack of broadband internet has been something of a barrier to the development of Netflix in Mexico. Slim’s América Móvil has the answer, however. Its Infinitum service is the leading provider of broadband in Mexico. Only recently, it has also set up 4G mobile internet services in the capital and leading provincial cities.

The new video streaming venture will bolster Slim’s strategy of bundling services. Clarovideo will presumably be added to phone bills that already include Direct TV, a pay TV service which does not belong to América Móvil but is a thorn in the flesh of rivals such as Televisa, the Spanish-speaking world’s largest entertainment conglomerate. Phone bills also include payments of electronics gear that an América Móvil unit provides telephone subscribers on easy terms through internet sales – another thorn, this time on the side of electronics retailers.

As well as the rivalry with Netflix and Televisa, Clarovideo now opens yet another chapter of the Battle of the Telecoms Titans, a real-life Mexican soap opera.

Only this Monday, Ricardo Salinas, the TV and retail magnate, announced yet another TV internet venture, called Totalmovie, which is to be launched in the first quarter of next year.

Once bitter rivals, Salinas and Televisa chief Emilio Azcárraga have joined forces in a bid to thwart Slim’s domination of mobile telephony. And now they must face his threat to move into their TV terrain.

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