When the owner of Canela TV, Isabel Rafferty, realized the growing demand for streaming, her eyes sparkled and the great idea of launching a new service came up. In 2020, she was about to launch her business, but the pandemic arrived. As the businesswoman wrote in an adweek article, the problem was more of a benefit: people were quarantined at home and had plenty of time to consume series and movies. Two years have passed, and now its on-demand content brand is a fierce competitor on the ground against Netflix, Vix+ and other giants.
Rating: ★★★
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Rafferty’s service has the attitude, but not the experience. The streaming giant that was born in the 90s, Netflix, today has 223 million subscribers, a figure that does not compete with the 8.3 million unique users of the other service. However, while the owner of “Merlina” and “La reina del sur” fail in your ad plan advertising and has to return money to advertisers, Canela TV’s audience is growing slowly on the free ad-supported content platform, which in the opinion of the owner, hopefully will be free “forever”, reported CNBC.
The Mexican company Isabel Safferty resides in the United States, from where she created Canela TV.
In terms of content, Canela TV thematically confronts Vix+, the TelevisaUnivisión platform, a great rival in the market in Mexico and which has offered content with a Peruvian cast after its entry into the market in July. The detail in common that the services have is the number of Mexican series and movies, at the level of classics and original productions, on the platforms.
In short, Canela TV has more than 50 linear channels and 20,000 hours of on-demand content. For a free service, it has its own, but it is not exempt from defects. Below, we recap everything you can find in this streaming created by a Hispanic resident in the United States and who wants to offer “culturally relevant programming” for the Latino community in the world. Let’s see how interesting it is and how much of Peru is in this streaming.
CONTENT
Canela TV does not have great successes, such as “La Familia Peluche” or “Yo soy Betty, la fea”, since among its main allies is not TelevisivaUnivisión, but Atres Media, Caracol Televisión, RCN Más+, among others. Although there is interesting content in English and Spanish among the 16 series and 16 movie categories, its most striking latest original productions are the Mexican reality show “Secretos de villanas” and the Latino talk show “Mi Vida”.
The service relies heavily on live channels (Canela Cinema, Family Parties, Mexican Action and more), but two unusual categories in streaming catalogs stand out. The first is the “spicy” genre, part of the section with the logo of a blonde woman on a red background that opens the door to the drawer of adult tapes, such as “No Condom”, “Lady’s Gynecologists”, “Instructions for polygamy”, “My cousin, the sexologist”, etc. The second is “inspiration and faith”, a section with a variety of little-known tapes on spirituality, such as “Jesus, Mary and Joseph”, “San Francisco and Santa Clara”, “Don Ca”, “Barefoot Giants”, etc. .
On the other hand, the genre of “classic” movies and music channels are also varied, but the contents are not quality versions either, in terms of film and television production. It is worth saying that, in the first case, with all the Mexican material on the platform, there are no tapes by Cantinflas and Chespirito, and there is also very little by Pedro Infante.
In the left display, there is the special sports section, “Sports”. This Friday, a subcategory called “Hasta Siempre, O’Rei” appeared with all the material from the soccer idol of Brazil and the world, Pelé, who passed away at the age of 82 after a long life of professional achievements. In this trunk of documentaries, there are “Sucia 58″, “Chile 62″ and “México 70″. In addition, the sports segment of the platform has other fictions and docuseries on boxing, surfing and wrestling, including a movie about the popular Mexican fighter Santo (“El enmascarado de plata”).
In the children’s section, “Kids”, the most interesting is the “Barney and his friends” series, a modern version of Garfield the cat, the Pocoyo figure program, also some episodes of Snoopy, and the original production of Canela TV with puppets “Club mundo”, among others. In general, they are proposals for an audience that is more children than youth.
10 Peruvian stories on Canela TV
There are at least 21 national productions in its catalogue.
1
The Wooden VW Beetle
A grandfather drives a vintage Volkswagen car, the beetle version, from Peru to New York to fulfill a promise to his daughter.
2
night bolero
A classic of Peruvian cinema. Giovanni Ciccia plays a man passionate about women and life who wants to compose a bolero that will last in the memory of Peruvians.
3
Pantaleon and the visitors
You already know where this film starring Salvador del Solar and Angie Cepeda ended up when it left Prime Video.
4
a shadow ahead
Diego Bertie, who this year left an unbreakable mark on the arts community when he passed away at the age of 54, is the young engineer Enrique Aet in this drama by Augusto Tamayo.
5
Love overdose
Gianella Neyra, Renzo Chuller and Gian Piero Díaz star in this comedy where a woman is about to get married and makes a serious mistake before the wedding.
6
like in the movies
It is a comedy by Gonzalo Ladines that deals with the love of cinema and stars Manuel Gold, Pietro Sibille and Gisela Ponce de León.
7
South winds
The cheese of the diets
In this drama, Nina (Carolina Niño de Guzmán) meets her grandfather Fausto after 15 years and finds him obsessed with a supposed family treasure.
8
Daisy flower
In this children’s film, the actress Francisca Aronsson is Margarita, a sweet girl who must face the birth of her new brother.
9
mystic rose
Augusto Tamayo’s film stars Fiorella Penano, who is Santa Rosa de Lima. It is a drama where the blessed discovers her vocation and with it lives an internal conflict.
10
Ricotta
menu braves
There are 36 episodes of a series where the chef and ambassador of the Peru Brand Christian Bravo looks for the best restaurants to tell his entrepreneurial stories.
POOPULARITY
“The ads are crazy,” says María Burgos in a comment on the Canela TV Facebook page. In another comment, a user vents her discomfort because the service places ads “every 10 minutes” in the movies. In fact, most of the commercials that exist do not last more than 3 or 10 seconds, but this can be a turning point for those who have already left the television format behind. On the other hand, other comments highlighted the “good programming” of the platform.
DEVICES
Canela TV is available on all devices (cell phones, web, players, smart TV’s and linear). Browsing differs from other platforms such as Netflix and Prime Video in the distribution of the tabs, since the presentation of the programs, movies, and series is more similar to a YouTube channel than a streaming service.
Kate Del Castillo CR: Juan Pablo Puentes/Canela TV
On a tablet and on the web, it is easier to move forward or backward the minutes of playback of a movie or series. On a smart television, the remote control is used to navigate and the interesting thing is that just by positioning the pointer on a movie or series, the synopsis written on a strip at the bottom of the window immediately appears. It is an option that other platforms should consider to reduce content selection time.
DEFECTS
For more productions, less quality. In this sense, if Canela TV is not going to place blockbuster content in its catalog, it will have to put more effort into its original productions to compete with other platforms that have current works by well-known international figures in film and television, such as Tim Burton, Alfonso Cuarón, Shonda Rimes, etc.
In this sense, a weak point is on the side of soap operas. Although there is a section dedicated to Turkish, Mexican, Colombian productions, among other successful nationalities in the genre, most are unknown productions in some countries. Another weakness are Latino films, such as “From the Other Side of the Bridge” (1980) and “14 Swords” (2010), which add to a catalog of rehashes (old stories) of few stars.
To be free, Canela TV has a differentiated content offer, it is also growing in numbers and accepting Latin productions in its lists. You never know: if CEO Isabel Rafferty’s sales strategies continue to find success with her original productions, in a few years Vix+, Netflix and others might start to fear.
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