Key executives from Exile Content, Sony Pictures Television and Estrella Media, featured in one of the panels on the ninth day of LA Virtual Screenings 2022, where they highlighted their content production strategies for Latin America.
The panel, which was moderated by Fabricio Ferrara, International Business Director at Prensario International, had as guests Alejandro Uribe, ECO at Exile Content, John Rossiter, EVO, distributor & Networks, Latin America at Sony Pictures Television, and Peter Markham, CEO of Middle Star.
Regarding the different VOD content business models and how they can be related, Rossiter said that today all the players in each segment ‘complement each other’: ‘I think that something that the pandemic has left behind is that models such as AVOD and SVOD can coexist together, even in the same company and on the same platform, and the important thing here is that the forms of consumption of these models are different, so for the producers it is an opportunity to draw up projects based on this’. The executive added that he «eagerly» looks forward to the next few years to find out what the peak of the market will be like once these strategies have settled more on the big players.
As for Exile, Uribe offered his perspective as a production company regarding the panorama of content for the Hispanic market: ‘I think one of the transforming elements within the industry is the proliferation of streaming and the interesting thing is that today we can access a lot of information and get closer in one way or another to the demand for content in the future, but on the other hand, there is a problem, and that is that there is a lot of content that wants to appear in large services and they have that concept that the big platforms guarantee the success of a product. The CEO believes that producing content is a «challenge and challenge» in the region, because the competition is «fierce»: «In addition to competing with foreign content, we must create very relevant content to compete with our local peers and that is why that IP is so important for us today, when historically it was an element that was almost always handled by TV players or large studios’.
Offering the vision of the broadcaster, Markham said: ‘Today, the linear model is still very important to us, we take a content approach first to everything we do. We’ve got our own content studios in the US and in California, Texas and we started to partner with more partners in LatAm, all our signals are very focused on live content and live and original shows, offering coverage of different events , I think that’s where our differentiator lies with respect to the streaming market’. Although the executive highlighted the online business, he expressed that digital is not an isolated business for them: ‘Much of our content produced by us continues to have life in digital players, so I agree with the fact that a business is complemented by other’.
