Netflix is today the most popular online series and movie legal service.
It is globally and also in Latin America.
In the last quarter of last year, the streaming content provider exceeded five million customers in the region, out of a total of 200 million new subscribers worldwide.
However, there is life beyond.
Qubit
The company was born in Argentina in 2010.
The objective of its founder, Mariano Primavera, was “to reach a part of the population that companies like Netflix do not reach.”
According to Primavera, what prevents many citizens from accessing these services is the method of payment: credit cards.
So he reached agreements with several internet operators from different countries to include their cost in the telephone bill. Although you can also pay by credit card.
The monthly plan with access to a thousand films costs about the US $ 6.
Qubit offers its service in Argentina, Colombia, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and has more than one million customers.
Crackle
It is the online television platform of Sony Pictures Television.
He was born in 2011 in the United States, and in April 2012 he announced the official launch of his services in 18 Spanish-speaking countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia,
It is also operational in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
It is a free service, but those who choose to use it will have to see ads.
Its catalog is more limited than that of other platforms since it has slightly less than 400 movies, including content from Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures, Screen Gems, Sony Pictures Classics, and others, as well as full episodes of television series.
Mubi
On February 14, 2007, Efe Cakarel, who then worked for Goldman Sach investment banking, founded Mubi.com, an online platform for moviegoers that allows movie playback, based in Palo Alto, California.
It was conceived as a site similar to Netflix and under a subscription model to access its catalog.
At six years old, he had reached 7 million users after expanding to 11 countries and establishing offices in London and Istanbul.
And since February of last year, it operates in Mexico.
The launch came from the hand of Canada, a film producer directed by actors Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna.
The monthly subscription costs the US $ 7.8.
Cave
The Argentine company was for a long time the main competitor of Netflix in the region.
Since it was created in 2009, the website that allows you to download movies and television series subtitled in Spanish for free has grown exponentially to become one of the most popular portals in Latin America.
At its best, it came to have 2 million unique daily users, a quarter of them Argentine, and the rest of Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Spain, the United States, and so on.
But beyond their seemingly unstoppable growth, many questioned the legality of the page.
But on February 6, 2013, the Buenos Aires Federal Chamber considered “HBO” excessively broad and disproportionate: to prevent entry to the website in the context of a case for infringement of copyright laws.
Even so, it affected him that on January 19, 2012, the FBI closed the Megaupload file hosting service.
And is that the content of Cuevana was not hosted on its page, but was linked by Megaupload and its huge video library. And while Megaupload was not the only source of content for Cuevana, it was the main source.
Although some still call it “pirate”, the company is still active and launched in March of this year Storm, an application to access the content without having to download the file, and is available for Windows and Mac.
