Panel Waterston Horowitz Aparicio Spanglish Bohl Castalia Fiterre Condista Garcia Unanimo Sports
The panel Connecting Content to the Consumer at the 21st Annual Hispanic Television Summit in New York addressed the beginnings of programming distribution in the US Hispanic market.
Adriana Waterston, EVP of Insights and Strategy Leader at Horowitz Research, who moderated the talk, gave a brief tour of the evolution of the US Hispanic TV market, quoting some notes from Filemón López, former Senior VP of Strategic Operations at Comcast. López could not attend the discussion but is considered one of the pioneering executives of Hispanic TV.
Waterston commented that López worked for many years at Comcast and is one of the leaders in bringing the Hispanic market to Comcast and building its offering. Quoting Lopez’s notes, she said: “I was asked in 2001, after the purchase of AT&T Broadband, to go to Miami and lead the South Florida market for Comcast. I found a disorganized market with multiple corporate cultures, little control, and the most diverse market in subscribers. Being the first Hispanic leader in the market, what mattered to me the most was that we had neglected the Hispanic market: the programming was not right, the packages were out of reach for most, and on the radio were ads for DIRECTV advertising Hispanic packages and none for Comcast broadband. I immediately realized there was a great opportunity for Comcast to establish a strategy in both programming and content and prices and packages.”
Luis Torres-Bohl, president of Castalia, mentioned that in the 1980s when he worked for CBS in New York, an edition of Time Magazine had on the cover that Hispanics were the new thing, and, at that time, Hispanics were only 2 % of the population, expecting to grow by at most 3%. “Almost 40 years later, we have come a long way, and the market has changed dramatically. However, still in 2023, some people do not understand it.”
Lino García, head of Unan1mo Deportes, part of the founding team of ESPN Deportes with 20 years in the market this year, said he felt “blessed” that Disney and ESPN did not understand, as he did, the need to launch a Hispanic sports channel until 2002. “I was a cable executive in Puerto Rico in 1989, and I asked my Hispanic channel representative for a Hispanic version of ESPN,” he noted. “In 2003, I was fortunate to launch ESPN Deportes and make it grow.” He added that even marketing to Hispanics was so elementary, but today has become much more sophisticated. As examples, he mentioned Jorge Fiterre of Condista and Torres-Bohl of Castalia. “Both brought all that content from South America because it costs a lot of money to do it from scratch and get the market. The content is there, and this was the niche programming that reached people who wanted to see content from their country of origin. Then the big media companies realized there was a real market and started investing.”
Gustavo Aparicio, managing director of Spanglish Movies, highlighted the company’s active role in the FAST scenario. He said that FAST’s CPMs in the Hispanic market are already reaching the same level as the general market. “Nowadays, everyone recognizes the market. We are already almost 20% of the population (63 million, with estimates of reaching 100 million people very soon). Latinos contributed 6.2% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), reaching 12% next year.”
García highlighted he is exploring launching a channel with Unan1mo Deportes, currently only with digital and audio components.
Aparicio also highlighted the role of technology. “I think technology offers different opportunities to monetize content: subscriptions, advertising-based, ticket sales,” he said. Today, +7 billion people have mobile phones, only one billion are pay TV subscribers, and 2 billion have open TV. “People consume content from multiple sources. We do not depend on a platform; we bring content to the consumer, whether it is connected to TV, linear channels, or movie theaters. The more, the better; every dollar counts.”
Jorge Alberto Fiterre, partner at Condista LABS Technical Operations, said that although FAST continues to grow, he notices that operators have begun to be more selective with the channels they distribute.
