Executives from some of the region’s biggest broadcasters and platforms talk vertical, legacy IP, and backing stories that will travel.
The LA Screenings Independents has long been an opportunity for indie distributors to capitalize on the wealth of buyers in town to screen newly ordered American dramas and comedies at the Hollywood studios. Once a hub for meeting with content acquisition heads from everywhere before you lost them to the studio lots, it has evolved over the years into mostly a LatAm event. More than 50 exhibitors took part this year, and according to on-the-ground reports, buyer attendance was softer than many would have liked, a refrain we hear about a lot of markets these days. Too many events, a shrinking number of buyers, programmers everywhere rethinking audience attention strategies.
ScreenMDM Español, the Spanish-language arm of ScreenMDM, led by Elizabeth Bowen-Tombari, caught up with senior executives from TelevisaUnivision, TV Azteca, América Multimedia in Peru, WBD LatAm, and Canal 13 in Chile to explore what’s working with audiences across the region. The answer: it’s vertical, it has an IP angle (based on one or can become one), and collaboration is crucial for creating content that can travel.
You can access all of these interviews in Spanish here.
This post for ScreenMDM Extra subscribers and ScreenMDM Club includes:
ScreenMDM Extra subscribers, read the whole piece here. ScreenMDM Club members, go here.
· Macro to Micro: Damián Villar Talks TelevisaUnivision’s Big Short-Form Bet
· TV Azteca’s Evolution: Content Chief Adrián Ortega on Finding New Audiences
· Global & Local: The View from Warner Bros. Discovery’s Mariano Cesar
· Embracing Multiplatform & Collaboration: América Multimedia’s Fernando Muñiz
· Canal 13 in Chile’s Vertical Lead: Pioneering the Mininovela
Macro to Micro: Damián Villar Talks TelevisaUnivision’s Big Short-Form Bet
A leader in Spanish-language production, with market-leading outlets in the U.S. Hispanic market and Mexico, TelevisaUnivision has taken a decisive approach to the vertical content market, launching the mobile-first platform ViX MicrO.
“We saw the opportunity and decided we had to get into this,” Damián Villar, general director of content and production, told ScreenMDM Español. “We did a very thorough analysis of all the data and mobile consumption, and we thought it would be a business that could serve as a very interesting complement for our audience, especially for those between 19 and 35 years old.”
The move required a major shift in the Spanish-language content giant’s storytelling and production processes. “If you don’t have a cliffhanger in the first three or four seconds of the episode, you won’t manage to hook them anymore,” Villar explained. “Today, we don’t just have one per episode; we have two or three within a minute or a minute and a half. That is necessary to try to capture the audience.”
It’s taken months of trial and error to get here, Villar concedes, as the team has experimented with storytelling styles and genres and mulled how to address the volume issue when a user can blaze through an entire show in less than a day. TelevisaUnivision has launched some 70 micro-titles, making two to three a week. The aim is to top 100 by year-end, scaling to 300 annually. Each show takes five days to film.
As has largely been the scale with its long-form output, TelevisaUnivision is ensuring it owns all of its IP in the vertical space. Adapting titles from its significant back catalog could be on the horizon, Villar said. “That heritage is gold; it’s a jewel. So, if what we’re going to do isn’t going to be worth it, we won’t touch it.”
The vertical slate is heavily skewed to melodrama, at 80%, but diversification is on the planner for this year and next, including true crime and horror.
ScreenMDM Extra subscribers, read the whole piece here. ScreenMDM Club members, go here.
