The Southern Cone Viewed From the U.S.

"The Argentinean market is in continual evolution," said Enrique Martinez, senior vp of Discovery Latin America. He also commented that there has been a lot of ownership changes from the cable and distribution standpoint over the past couple years. The consolidation has had a significant impact on the industry.

From a growth standpoint, the market is very much saturated, depending on which statistics are used. Somewhere in the order of 55 percent of all television households in Argentina have pay-TV services. The Argentine market has been somewhat of a latecomer to the DTH game. However, there have been some inroads in relation to direct home access, especially with the recent launch of DirecTV and the announcement from Sky regarding the impending launch of their satellite service.

Argentina has always been a very competitive market. The industry flourished many years ago, long before any of the neighboring markets. Unlike other parts of Latin America where the industry flourished as the result of piracy or the spillover of the U.S. signals (the footprint didn't reach that far south), in Argentina there was the need to develop content. By the time the American companies had begun focusing on that market, there was already a strong programming and content industry in place.

According to Director of Scheduling and Acquisitions Ryan Shiotani, Discovery Networks Latin America has made a big commitment to foster relationships with local independent producers and to feature more Latin American stories, as well as Latin American talent. According to Shiotani, a lot of work has been done in Argentina. One of Discovery's local productions is Attentado at 9:53 a.m.; it's based on the exact hour that there was a terrorist attack on a Jewish association in Buenos Aires. This is a co-production that Discovery did with Promofilms, an Argentine production company that produced a version of this for Artear, using a lot of that company's footage.

Is it cheaper to produce in Argentina than it is elsewhere in Latin America? For Shiotani it is not a question of cost, but rather a question of the stories and the expertise that the local partners have been able to bring to the table.

In terms of the financial side, with the devaluation of the real in Brazil it has become less expensive to film there. Martinez also explained Discovery's sponsoring of the Ecochallenge, which will take place this year at Bariloche. It is known as an adventure race. There are teams of four people, of which at least one member must be of the opposite sex, and they compete in a variety of challenging activities, including mountain climbing, repelling and kayaking. This is the fifth year of the Discovery Ecochallenge.

There is also a good advertising market in Argentina. One that offers a lot of potential and that programmers have not yet tapped. For foreign companies that have been active in Argentina, there's still a lot of upside and opportunity there.

Is the Argentine market ripe for the Internet? Yes, in the opinion of Martinez. But for convergence, it has a long way to go. A lot of the cable plants that exist in Argentina are quite old and need significant upgrading. From an Internet market perspective, access to telephony since the breakup of privitazation of the telephone companies has improved significantly. There's no problem in accessing phone lines in Argentina, unlike other parts of Latin America. Argentina is ripe for heavy Internet activity, although according to Martinez, Brazil, Chile and Mexico have been the healthiest, most traffic-driven countries in terms of Internet usage. In terms of convergence, a lot of investment has yet to be made, and that will only happen once the ownership structures and the management structures of the major groups in Argentina are solidly defined.