To watch TV, read an email on your phone or download a video to your computer, you likely use satellite services. But most people don’t know how satellites work, how the satellite business operates or how explosive growth in demand for bandwidth may affect what we pay for communications. Carmen Gonzalez-Sanfeliu, vice president for Latin America and the Caribbean for Intelsat, demystified all that at WorldCity’s CEO Club on March 5, prompting a lively discussion into how modern communications is revolutionizing everything, from banking to real estate to even management.… Read More
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HBO's Jose Sariego
HBO's Sariego: New media, piracy and protectionism are biggest challenges
HBO Latin America has three primary issues in Latin America, at least from a legal point of view, according to Jose Sariego, the company’s senior vice president for Business and Legal Affairs.
Those three are new media, piracy and protectionism, according to Sariego, who spoke at WorldCity’s Government Affairs Connections meeting today.
Government Affairs Connections is exclusively for the public policy officials working for either South Florida’s multinationals or multinational companies with a Latin America presence. The group meets every other month.
Although there are more than 1,100 multinationals in WorldCity’s Who’s Here database, the government affairs position is filled only by the largest companies, or in a few other cases, smaller companies with a strong reason to need regular interaction with government officials.
The event, held at the Coral Gables Hyatt, was attended by executives representing FedEx, Nokia, Crowley Liner Services, Chevron, Burson Marsteller, Discovery Networks and others.
The event series is sponsored by the international law firm Fowler Rodriguez Valdes-Fauli.
HBO Latin America is a joint venture, with Sony and Ole as partners. Among the programming it distributes in addition to HBO are Cinemax, A&E, Biography, E!, the History Channel, Sony Entertainment Television and others.
It distributes basic and premium programming in 28 countries, with offices in Caracas, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Sao Paulo. Its South Florida headquarters is in Coral Gables and it has a technical facility in Sunrise, from which it beams its signal into Latin America.
The rule of law is less developed in Latin America than in the United States or, as Sariego said, “We have five year contracts we review every three months.”
While Sariego is an attorney, “our biggest weapon is flipping the switch,” he said, referring to shutting off service to networks if there is a dispute that isn’t being resolved. “And it’s 18 channels all at once.”
Protectionism is a rising concern, as the politics of a number of Latin American nations move toward a more nationalistic tenor, amped up by the global economic slowdown.
New media, whether the internet delivered on computers or cell phones is closely associated with piracy. Movies that were once pirated soon after a release and available on boot-leg CDs, videotapes or DVDs are now finding their way to the internet prior to the actual release.
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