On the ninth day of panels at VS Next, two new conferences were premiered with focus on the Latino content and the new business models in both, Ibero America and the US Hispanic.
LAVS 2021 presented on Tuesday 18 two panelsthat reflected the good moment these territories are going through in terms of content development, broadcasting, streaming and business. On the first one, “US Hispanic: the promised land”, three US media groups describe their growth, market perspectives and the strategies they are developing. The moderator was Richard Middleton, editor at TBI.
Jorge Balleste, VP Content Partnership and Acquisitions at Univision Communications, the largest Hispanic media conglomerate, commented: ‘From my position I lead the partnership and acquisitions for our AVOD PrendeTV—launched last March—, and the cable networksGalavision and UniMas. The first of these is a premium streaming Ad-Supported services offering +40 channels and 11,000 hours of programming in Spanish or with subtitles’.
About the content strategy, he added: ‘Today, the platform feeds on content from Univisión and Televisa —the companies announced a merge in April—, as well as from our providers from across the region in different genres such as drama, comedy, films, animation and entertainment’.Balleste also confirmed that Univision is evaluating PrendeTV expansion in more territories within the region, so they are open to acquiring ‘more content’.
Guillermo Sierra, head of television and digital services at HITN, added: ‘We continue to expand throughout the region with Edye, our SVOD that offers safe and educational content. We currently have agreements with more than 20 content distributors around the world in genres such as nature, history, cooking and even factual’.
Doris Vogelmann, VP Programming and operations at Vme Media, completed: ‘We have seen a stable audience balance in our three networks, basically since the pandemic began, and since some sectors assumed the lockdown at home. That is why we fill the screens with more educational content, while continuing to feed our classic grid of entertainment and animation content’.
The second panel, “Content for kids: present & future” was moderated and coproduced with Paul Vaca, executive director, Ci Edutainment, who talked to Yago Fandiño, head of children content, RTVE (Spain), Genaro Diaz, Coordinator of Planning, Image and Advertising, Televisa (Mexico) and Cielo Salviolo, director, PakaPaka (Argentina).
Fandiño: ‘In the last 10 months we saw audience growth in our signal, but above all a change in timing, as well as a change in content consumption, with a greater increase in programming viewing through our digital screens. It is worth noting that Spain was one of the territories that was most conservative in this regard for children’s content, so now it joins the global trend of consumption through online screens’.
Salviolo added: ‘Argentina was a country that had strong restrictions to contain the pandemic, so we did a titanic job by producing a lot of content to meet the entertainment needs of the little ones at home, with educational content, which lasted from 8 to 10 hours of this type of content’.
Diazfinalized: ‘Once we understood the consumption of children’s content in a pandemic, we were able to meet the needs of this segment and we were very successful. We created a lot of live content that allowed real-time interaction with our audience. This strategy encompassed both our linear signals and our digital displays’.
New panels can be watched each day at VS Next on LAVS platform: https://virtualscreenings.com/VS-LA/vs-next/panel-15/
