Convenciones
Mipcom 2012: Latin America attracts international attention
The two first days of Mipcom 2012 were really huge about people traffic, announcements and events. Content business runs on a time of changes and opportunities, so it is essential to keep moving forward. Co-productions and new platforms, are clearly the two main vectors of the industry.The emergent markets are the third one. If Canada is the country of honor, Latin America is the region that has taken most the attention of the industry this Mipcom, due to the strategic expansion moves of the leading telenovela players and the public associations of various of their countries.
Just this Tuesday, there were cocktails at the Televisa booth, at the Mexican and Chilean pavilions and there was a party organized by Argentina Audiovisual, headed by the public entities Ucine and INCAA. The first and the latter ones were crowded with attendants.
Adriana Cisneros, vice chairman & VP of the Cisneros Group of companies, and one of the top figures of the Latin American media industry, was one of the top speakers of Mipcom. She said: ‘This is the era of Latin America, the growth of the region this Mipcom is 36% and in the year 2020, a 40% of the population will be mid class. The digital advertising market involves USD 4 billion, and grows 20% per year’.
While today Wednesday its CEO Emilio Azcárraga Jean will be named ‘Personality of the Year’ by Reed Midem, Mexican Televisa announced yesterday one of the top news of the year: leading Colombian producer RTI will be an exclusive production house for its U.S. Hispanic TV channel Telefutura, covering two telenovela slots per day with fully original content for three years. RTI was till now a main competitor in telenovelas, and the news can change the very competitive U.S. Hispanic market.
Other Latin news: the Argentinean TV series format Killer Woman (Pol-ka) was acquired to be produced by Colombian actress Sofia Vergara (Modern Family) and Luis Balaguer, from Latin We, for ABC in the U.S domestic market. The pilot will be shot soon and will cost approximately USD 5 million; the deal was done through Mediabiz (Argentina) and Pedro Torres’ El Mall (Mexico).
NBC, on the other side, has bought from Chile one sci-fi series (Gen Mishima, TVN) and a reality (Opposite Worlds, Canal 13). Colombian broadcaster RCN has launched two months ago the TV channel MundoFox with Fox for the U.S. Hispanic, and now is preparing a sports channel with DirecTV, for Colombia.
Other market news announced yesterday: the number of HD channels in Europe has reached 941 this month: UK has 229, Germany 108 and France 95, according to European Audiovisual Observatory. The UK market, also, is ready to complete the analogue switch over this October 23rd, 2012.
Hulu, the online titan, and Viacom, have signed a new deal to make the Nickelodeon contents available in Hulu Plus service. And Hulu is also co-producing with BBC UK the show The wrong mans, which will be available both in Hulu, Hulu Plus and BBC UK network in 2013. Dori Media Group (Switzeland) has sold the game show format Money Pump to ITV Studios (UK). It is very successful in Channel 2, Israel.
Under the Memorandum of Understanding signed recently, the public agencies FINAS (Malaysia) and MDA (Singapore) announced that have joined forces to promote the Asian Animation Summit, to be held in Kuala Lumpur on December 10-11. Serbia Broadband will shortly launch its VOD service D3 Go, in Bosnia. In Hungary, the advertisement pie will fall down 10% this year; though, the main broadcasters are launching big budget new TV cable channels this quarter.
What’s next? Pierluigi Gazzolo, COO at Viacom Worldwide, shows an interesting vision: ‘Now our focus is on Franchise Management. Depending on each property, we design a different multiple window strategy, to explode our brands in all possible ways. In the multiple screen age, product franchises are more important than TV channels’.
Nicolas Smirnoff and Fabricio Ferrara