Telecommunications company Telefonica Peru, where, as in the rest of the Latin American countries where it operates, it does so under the ‘Movistar‘ brand, has officially announced this last Monday, July 12th, that it has requested the Peruvian Organismo Supervisor de Inversion Privada en Telecomunicaciones (Osiptel), entity in charge of regulating the public telecommunications services market in the country, to reconsider the resolution that considers it as an important supplier in the country’s pay TV wholesale market.

This is a resolution issued by Osiptel on June 17th, in which, after having developed an analysis of the pay TV market in the country, it reported that Telefonica Peru has a dominant position in the provision of this service and, for this reason, it establishes that the company must share the infrastructure that it uses to provide its pay TV offer, and market or resale this offer to other providers, as well as report Osiptel about agreements that the company may run in this regard.

According to Telefonica Peru, Osiptel’s resolution ‘creates a clear impact on free competition and market performance, since it regulates a single company and does not take into account the impact of piracy, nor the competitive incidence of OTTs as Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, and others’. In addition, the telecommunications company has also expressed itself on the requirement ordered by Osiptel to resell its TV services to other providers, and stated that the measure ‘affects the copyright and the rights of national and international content programmers, who offer their productions exclusively and / or with precise clauses that bans the resale of their works’.

In relation to piracy, Telefonica Peru reported that, although Osiptel acknowledges its impact, it has not considered it in the market report it has made. ‘Instead of focusing on correcting the unfair competition of those who do not report their pay TV connections, the regulator establishes obligations to only one company of the 680 officially available in the market, without taking into account the large number of clandestine connections that exist and that threaten copyrights and a healthy competitive dynamic’, reported Ana Claudia Quintanilla, Regulations Manager at Telefonica Peru.

‘As the regulator has  shown with different sources of information, the Peruvian Pay TV market is going through a complete transformation and faces  a serious threat because of piracy. Instead of making decisions that generate more burdens on formal operators, there is an urgent need for a State policy to combat this illegal activity that affects consumers and competition’,  the executive ended.