ABOTTS’ Daniel Djahjah Talks Building the LATAM Streaming Business Community at Streaming Media 2025
Daniel Djahjah, director of partnerships for ABOTTS, the Brazilian and Latin American Association for OTT and Streaming, joins Future Frames producer Doug Daulton at Streaming Media 2025 to discuss the origins, growth, and mission of ABOTTS to cultivate community and growth in the Brazilian and broader LATAM streaming landscape. They also touch on the impact of AI on streaming pertaining to content management and localization.
What Is ABOTTS?
Daulton invites Djahjah to talk about ABOTTS, which Djahjah says is more of a community than an association. “It’s a community of vendors, businessmen, streaming platforms, technology providers—everything that goes around the streaming and broadcasting business,” he notes. “Because the team is so diverse and our associates are so diverse, we work with local players and international players, and that goes from all the different pillars of the industry. So if you think about business and you want to talk about distribution, we have our distribution counterparts within the association. We’re going to connect everybody together. If you’re a vendor and you want to talk about DRM or CDN installation and growth or implementation of different standards in the industry of how we’re working with programmatic ads, we have our ads teams that come in together,” Djahjah continues. “So literally it’s joining forces as partners to help companies from U.S. and international to go into Latin America and also companies from Latin America to find business and work with national partners as well.”
Daulton asserts, “It feels to me like that old adage: Five men go up and touch an elephant and depending on where they touch it, they think it’s a different thing. And it sounds like what you’re working on is being able to have that interpreter for: No matter where you touch the elephant, someone can tell you, ‘Hey, that nose attaches to this head and this is how these all things work together.’”
Djahjah agrees that this is the purpose of the community. It’s trying to fill the gap of having a single association that is structured for connecting the business of all aspects of streaming, not siloed, individual organizations, such as for pay TV, regulatory issues, or technology, he says as examples.
Current Goals for ABOTTS
Djahjah shares how ABOTTS started in Brazil about 6 years ago and “now we’re growing into different aspects of how we work to the audience on a B2B level, but also on a B2C.” It’s expanding into Argentina and Mexico, aiming to make connections throughout the LATAM region.
Daulton asks, “Well, it also then gives you an interface out to the rest of the global market, right?”
“Yes, exactly,” Djahjah replies. He reminds Daulton that this is a new goal. “We’re associating ourselves with Rise and also for Women in Streaming Media as well. And we’re looking also into blending our association with media events and other associations too. So also in Europe and the U.S.” Attending Streaming Media is part of this, he notes, as well as NAB and IBC.
Daulton suggests going to the “smaller, more targeted conventions and gatherings, which from my perspective oftentimes are the better opportunity because you get that hallway conversation, that conversation at the bar that maybe you don’t get when you’re kind of running and gunning all the time at the bigger shows.”
“I usually say, as my father always told me, the best business are done on a table, sometimes with a cup of wine or water, and you write the terms on a napkin,” Djahjah replies. “And you keep that napkin, and that’s your contract.”
“Then you have a handshake and then you take it back and your people finalize it,” Daulton adds.
“Exactly. That’s what we believe in,” says Djahjah.
A Perspective on Current Trends
Daulton asks, “So what are the trends or things you’ve seen here that have really spoken to you about maybe where the industry’s going, and what are the key things people should be looking for?
Offering praise for how Streaming Media curates its panels, Djahjah notes that “you guys know exactly the balance between, what is a presentation of something that is more direct to consumer, what is something that is more B2B, what is something more from a vendor perspective? But you guys create the debates and there’s discussion, there’s panels.”
He particularly enjoyed the conversations around AI at the conference and adds that “the shopification and interactivity, especially from the partners that are here and the partners that we represent also in ABOTTS, that makes a lot of connections. So when a consumer looks at a streaming platform and says, ‘I’m going to vote [during] The Voice,’ they don’t have an idea of what happens all in the background.” He explains, “They usually have one company running one thing, but that company also is blended with four different APIs and different technologies that supply that system to work. So that for me is the fascinating part of TV.”
AI: Progress, but Uncertainty
Daulton has been noticing that although generative AI has been a hot topic on the creative side, “the real opportunity, at least in the short term, is things like data management and the AI being able to catch things quicker and more programmatically than the average person might. And that’s not necessarily replacing jobs, but just giving those people doing the jobs a better tool set. Would you agree with that?”
“Absolutely,” Djahjah says. “And my previous role was in Pluto TV. Of course, I can’t go deep into details, but when we try to break down and understand profitability per content, how it’s programmed, the cycling of the content, usually that would be on controls, on legacy systems that you have to adjust and readapt every time … a new system comes in. … AI facilitates all that.” But it still requires human management, he cautions. AI becomes productivity, which becomes efficiency as it improves—and that is good business. He’s unsure what’s going to happen with AI. “It’s all uncertain,” Djahjah notes. “But as far as tools and productivity, we already see it. We’re already using it, people are already doing it, and we’re already seeing the results.”
Daulton provides the example of AI in archive management: “You have this great archive, but maybe it’s shot in a new setting where it’s a very low resolution, but you can now upscale it, have AI kind of source it, figure out, hey, here’s valuable content we can repurpose. And it’s not something that people would think about as a powerful tool, but you have corporations that have huge libraries and now you have a way to surface the things that are valuable and can be repurposed. And those are the things I think are really interesting we’ll see coming down the pike.”
“And the tools to help support that content and become viable again,” Djahjah chimes in.
A Real-Life Experience: AI Dubbing
Djahjah mentions a panel he attended on AI dubbing localization, noting, “I lived that many times because I’ve been in sales and then on the platform side for content on the international spectrum. So when you go international, it used to be, ‘Here’s my series, here’s my movie.’ A broadcaster … said, ‘I’ll get it, I’ll work with my dubbers, I’ll do it my way, here’s my fee. And that’s it, let’s wrap up business.’ And then you wouldn’t even access that. That is also now changed with FAST coming in, with YouTube consumption growing. For even long-form content, the content owners want to have that asset and have it on hand, and they can decide, ‘Is this something I want to put top-notch dubbing [on]? Is this something I want to subtitle, close caption super fast, and get it out there? Or is this something I want to AI dub?’ So it’s becoming more accessible and more logical to get more business happening.”
Daulton builds on this example: “It’s also removing the friction of the process. … Before you only had the budget to do three languages, but now because AI can make at least the first pass more cost-effective, now you can say, ‘Well, maybe we’ll try to get into these other five or 10 markets because we can get the first pass and then we bring a human in to make sure everything’s right.’”
Djahjah and Daulton agree that this doesn’t mean human jobs will go away; there might be more job opportunities because the volume of work will grow and because the beginning of a process is made more cost-effective by AI. Higher consumption of video equals more business, Djahjah asserts. In addition, content can be pushed into more and more markets, Daulton adds.
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