“Despite the turbulent market, the Chello Multicanal portfolio is more competitive than ever before.”
Eduardo Zulueta
Managing Director at Chello Multicanal
Our partnership in brief
Clusters supported Chello Multicanal in strengthening its competitive position within a challenging pay TV market by delivering a detailed, behaviour-led viewer segmentation. The work provided a consistent framework for understanding how audiences consume content across channels, genres and time slots, enabling clearer brand differentiation and reducing internal channel cannibalisation.
The segmentation became a practical decision-making tool used to guide programming, scheduling and marketing strategy, helping the business optimise its portfolio and respond confidently to changing market dynamics. Over time, this insight-driven approach contributed to stronger viewing performance and improved portfolio competitiveness.
The challenge
Chello Multicanal is a Spanish pay television company, owned by Chellomedia (AMC Networks), operating 18 channels across Spain and Portugal ranging from movies, documentary and lifestyle, to cooking and children’s entertainment.
In an increasingly challenging and competitive Spanish pay TV market, where economic pressures have driven down subscriber numbers, Chello Multicanal needed to reaffirm its position in the marketplace and strengthen viewing share.
Raquel López, Research Manager, Chello Multicanal explains,
Having a big portfolio of channels, we needed to significantly distinguish each brand from one another, whilst at the same time being sure to minimise cannibalisation between channels. Our goal was insight that we could proactively action and use to create stronger brands in a highly competitive market.
The solution
Clusters carried out a detailed segmentation of Spanish TV viewers for the Chello Multicanal research team. Every year since, Clusters undertakes a refresh of the segmentation to monitor for changes.
The segmentation process is based on three months viewing data from a large national viewing panel. Based on these highly detailed data, Clusters uses its proprietary segmentation software to segment TV viewers based on the way they consume TV: the channels, genres and shows they watch, when they watch, and how much and how often they watch.
Chris Cowan, Clusters commented,
By undertaking such a detailed segmentation of TV viewers, we get a uniquely complete view of TV audiences. We provide Chello Multicanal with a set of distinct, clearly-defined audiences or segments based on specific viewing habits.
Clusters’ segment definition for Chello Multicanal has remained consistent for the past four years. Providing such a consistent framework of audience segments and TV show genres allows Chello Multicanal to identify key trends year on year, and to better align each channel in each timeslot to a priority audience.
Consequently, Chello Multicanal have been able to maximise viewing share growth at the expense of their competitors, and of course minimise cannibalisation between their own 18 channels. One key finding, for example, is that since 2010 certain specific audiences are consistently watching more films, factual entertainment, and lifestyle programmes, a finding that would be lost if only using demographics to define audiences.
Raquel López commented,
The insight provided to us by Clusters is highly valuable for a number of our key brands – in particular, documentary channel Odisea that operates in a hugely competitive environment, and our new lifestyle channel, Decasa. We use the insight from the segmentation to optimise our scheduling, to make informed decisions about which programmes to buy for which channels, as well as to inform marketing strategy for our strongest brands. Working with Clusters has been a highly rewarding experience thanks to their rigour and excellent attention to detail.
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