Totalmovie

» see totalmovie.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Netflix opened in Latin America in September 2011. Grupo Salinas, the Mexican conglomerate behind TV Azteca and Elektra, had Totalmovie in the market that July, which made it one of the few regional players that got there first rather than second. The catalog was movies and series plus TV Azteca's own programming, ninety-nine pesos or $7.99 a month, and by the big relaunch in late 2012 it was selling into forty countries across Latin America and the Caribbean.

That was never going to be my subscription, and I want to be accurate about the reason. This was a Spanish and Portuguese language service selling Mexican broadcast programming to households in Mexico City and São Paulo. Turkey in 2012 had no legal streaming service worth the name and would not for years; what a Turkish household did with a laptop and a film that year was something else entirely. Totalmovie belongs to a market that took the same problem at the same time on its own terms, and lost.

It did not lose to Netflix, at least not directly. By the end of 2012 Totalmovie reported 1.9 million registered members and was the number two service in the region, which for a Mexican conglomerate a year into a hard category is a real result. It lost because the people who owned it decided a different business was better.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ copying netflix on purpose ~

Salinas Pliego was unusually candid about the strategy. The original plan was to copy Netflix without much decoration, and he said so afterwards in the same breath as admitting it had not produced the expected result. That honesty is rarer than it should be in the genre. Most regional streaming failures are narrated as bold local innovation right up to the shutdown press release.

The copy was not a bad one. Salinas had the pipes, since Grupo Salinas also owned the broadband operator that became Totalplay, and it had the content, since TV Azteca is one of Mexico's two broadcast networks. What it did not have was a reason for a household to keep paying once Netflix's catalog got wider. That is the same wall every national OTT in the world hit between 2012 and 2016.

~ selling the plumbing ~

In November 2013 Total Media Networks, the parent of Totalmovie, merged with OTT Networks to create UUX Online TV Services, a white-label cloud TV product aimed at broadcasters worldwide. Salinas had been talking about live television over the internet for a year, calling it the first global service of its kind. UUX was the vehicle for that ambition, and the consumer subscription business became the thing standing in its way.

On 26 March 2014 the service was suspended. Grupo Salinas said it was redirecting resources to UUX and to video on demand built around its open-television channels, which was true and also meant the subscribers were the part being redirected away from. El Universal ran it under the headline that Totalmovie was canceling its video service; BNamericas put it more bluntly. The suspension was never lifted.

~ what mexico watched instead ~

The gap Totalmovie left got filled twice. Televisa launched Blim in 2016 as the establishment's answer, and it spent years being the streaming service Mexicans had heard of and did not subscribe to. Underneath both of them, the actual answer for most of the continent was Cuevana and the sites that replaced it every time one got taken down. A legal Latin American streaming service that got there before Netflix and reached 1.9 million accounts is a genuinely respectable thing to have built, and its owner closed it to sell software to broadcasters instead.

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