The Cuban regime announced that its streaming platform Picta will include commercial advertising, subscriptions from abroad, and channel memberships, in an effort to generate revenue through a state digital tool amid the deep economic crisis the country is experiencing.
The announcement was made during the event for the second anniversary of Z17 and Picta, which brought together content creators, developers, and representatives from the Havana Scientific and Technological Park.
"You can advertise on Picta. We can also mention subscriptions to external content. You can now become a member of a channel, which is a way to access exclusive content from creators and directly support that creator," said Marcos Pérez, the platform's technical director.
Channel membership functions as a mechanism through which users pay creators directly to access exclusive content, a model similar to that offered by YouTube, but adapted to the Cuban environment with payments in pesos via national bank cards.
Subscriptions from abroad represent another significant step, although the regime faces a fundamental technical obstacle: registration on Picta is mainly enabled for Cuban mobile lines, which has limited access from outside the island.
Canal Habana and Picta signed an agreement for content management on the platform, aiming to expand the digital presence of the channel and bring its audiovisual production closer to various audiences.
Z17, the mixed company that includes Picta, toDus, and Apklis, was established in September 2024 between the Telecommunications Company of Cuba (ETECSA) and the Scientific and Technological Park of Havana.
Picta was born in 2018 as an initiative of the University of Information Sciences and ETECSA, presented at that time as the Cuban equivalent of Netflix. It has over 600,000 registered users and receives about a thousand new videos every month.
The incorporation of advertising on the platform is legally supported by the Social Communication Law (Law 162/2023), published in the Official Gazette in June 2024, which paved the way for commercial advertising in Cuban media under specific regulations.
Decree 102/2024 regulates it with a limit of three minutes per hour of broadcasting and prohibits it within children's programs and news shows.
The backdrop is the economic crisis that Cuba is experiencing after decades of dictatorship. The regime is urgently seeking sources of income in foreign currency and national currency. Its own digital platforms have become one of the few spaces where it attempts to replicate monetization models that the world has known for years.
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