Andres Palencia y Bruno Seros-Ulloa de LATV
Andrés Palencia and Bruno Seros-Ulloa, CEO and president of LATV, respectively, who have been leading the channel since March of this year, said that the current programming strategy is to focus totally on the Latino experience. Both have worked in several roles at the company since its inception.
“Sometimes they deem us only by gender or language, but we have content like The Q Agenda that shows more of what we have as a culture, which we recognize is influencing much more the American culture. We want to depict the impact and importance of our culture. Language alone does not tell the whole story,” said Palencia.
“I think our success is showing people that being Latino is much more than what traditional networks and programs show,” said Seros-Ulloa.
Palencia highlighted that LATV’s programming strategy is segmented on the traits that Latinos have in common, beginning with Latino culture. “We focus on sports content, music, comedy, entertainment, Latino culture.”
“Our audience is the future of the general market. It is our responsibility that this is reflected in a more genuine way,” Ulloa-Seros pointed out.
As an example of successful content with a long history on the channel’s grid, he mentioned El Zoo (Monday to Thursday, 10pm), which is in its ninth season. “Our A-list is the Latino who has the biggest name in popular American series, from Netflix series, Hulus, YouTube. They are the ones that will be the movie stars of tomorrow,” he said.
Part of their overall strategy is to include those from the LGBTQ communities in all aspects of content creation. For that demographic they have, in addition to La Agenda Q, My Health Agenda, Living and Ready, about health issues. “There was no content regarding mental health for the Latino LGBTQ community,” said Palencia.
One of LATV’s programming backbone is content for Latina women such as Pinkafé, (Tuesdays at 7pm), dedicated to Latina entrepreneurs; and Get it Girl (Monday and Thursday at 4:30pm), both have been renewed and are very successful.
Pinkafé will be the platform for a forum called Latino Alternative Summit which will be held in the summer. “It will be a forum for Latina entrepreneurs and women business owners, not only to do networking but to help them create content in the studios. We will include our partners and brands. Since we have a high profile as a minority-owned company, we also want to highlight the next minority-owned company,” Palencia said.
LATV also has two new shows that represent Afro-Latinos: Blacktinidad (Friday 7pm) which was launched in 2021; and this year, during the Black History Month, was premiered Shades of Beauty (Friday at 7:30pm), a lifestyle series with an Afro-Latin perspective. “All of this content is bilingual with 65 to 70% in English,” he said.
LATV also has a streaming app, which will be upgraded starting in June and available on the main platforms such as Samsung Plus TV. “The first launch will be in June with the app update, and for the fourth quarter, along with the fall primetime programming, we will offer exclusive content on it. Our goal is that this app is available on all the platforms that Latinos use to view content,” Palencia concluded.
