Disney+ Arrives in Mexico Amid Fierce Competition

This week was full of launches. The main star was undoubtedly Disney+, which came to the Mexican market after much expectation from its older fans eager to replay old series and movies, but also from users craving new productions like The Mandalorian. For Latin America, the Mickey Mouse company is already working on 70 productions, a central part of its commitment to this market according to Natalia Scalia, Regional Director of Direct to Consumer at the Walt Disney Company. "We believe it is very important to bet on local content and we have around 70 projects in the pipeline that are in different stages of development with talent in the region," she said in a virtual conference, reported Expansión. So far, Disney+'s catalog in Mexico offers 373 titles to users compared to the 4,535 titles available on Netflix. 

Just over a year after launching its service in the US, the platform already has 73.7 million users, which makes it a strong competitor to HBO Go, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, the latter being the current market leader with 193 million users as of 3Q20. In Mexico, Netflix leads the market with a 36 percent market share, followed by Amazon Prime Video with 22 percent, Claro Video with 14 percent and HBO Go with 11 percent. In the country, according to The Competitive Intelligence Unit, the streaming video market had a turnover of US$883 million in 2019. 

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• Another revelation this week was the new Fleets feature on Twitter, a new way of publishing on the platform, like stories on Instagram that disappear after 24 hours. On many occasions, said Joshua Harris, product manager of Twitter, users do not tweet because they are intimidated by the public space and by a feeling that their tweets must be perfect once published. "To help people feel more comfortable, we have been working on this new way of lowering the pressure on the platform to talk about something. Fleets is about sharing momentary thoughts," Harris said in a media presentation, according to CNBC.

• Talking about fleets, Pulpomatic, a platform that centralizes all fleet tools, allows companies to save costs, time and even reduce their carbon footprint. “By having everything centralized on a single platform, our customers receive savings and an impact on the time of use and efficiency of the fleet. Their business performs better with fewer vehicles. Another positive side effect is that Pulpomatic helps reduce CO2 emissions because we improve fuel efficiency and are able to take many vehicles off the road by making the fleet more efficient,” Evaristo Babé, CEO of Pulpomatic, said in an interview with MBN this week.

• Amazon yesterday also made its podcast service available to the Mexican market. In the coming months, said Federico Pedersen, Amazon Music's Director for Latin America in an interview for Expansión, the platform will launch local and original content for this region. "We are very happy to launch podcasts in Mexico and Brazil and be in the first wave of new things at Amazon Music. We will be offering all the content we have but this will also allow us to create original content. In Mexico, we will present the first original before the end of 2020," he said.

• The company led by Jeff Bezos also joined the pharmacy biz. Amazon launched its online pharmacy service for the US market, which allows customers in 45 states to order prescription drugs from the company's website or through its app. 

• Apple plans to initiate a program to reduce its commissions from 30 percent to 15 percent on the App Store starting in January 2021 for software developers who make US$1 million or less in-shop profits each year. However, once these companies exceed that margin, they will revert to the previous commission.