• Turner Launches Latin America OTT Service With Kaltura and IBM

    Turner Broadcasting System Latin America has launched a new OTT service in Latin America and Brazil, powered by Kaltura's OTT TV platform and IBM's SoftLayer cloud infrastructure.

    The service is being offered in Spanish and Portuguese and is available on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. It includes both live TV channels and VOD options. Notably, it is being offered through Turner's pay-TV partners, so it does not appear to be disruptive to the existing ecosystem, but rather a TV Everywhere extension.

    Kaltura's OTT TV platform is based on Tvinci, a company Kaltura acquired last year. As Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura's chairman, CEO and co-founder told me at the time, the platform is meant to support TV networks' and pay-TV operators' paid live/linear video services, in addition to ad-supported VOD. Ron views this business model flexibility as critical to the TV ecosystem's future success.

    OTT efforts are heating up all over the world, with lots of experimentation and announcements. In the U.S. in addition to the recently launched CBS All Access service, others that are either planning OTT launches or considering them include HBO, Showtime, Nickelodeon, Discovery and others. Conversely, Disney has said it has no current OTT plans.