Hemisphere Media Group: The moment the industry is undergoing is chaotic but also offers opportunities

Ariel Tobi, founder of Snap TV and SVP, Distribution and Content at Hemisphere Media Group, states that the moment the industry is undergoing, which he rates as “chaotic and for learning”, is a great opportunity, but also of big changes for the sector that produces content. Distribution, however, reduced its range of action. 

“Before, we produced novelas with more than a hundred episodes, there were a bunch of channels that consumed those novelas, and it was possible to go to other countries outside Latin America with those products. Today, novelas with less episodes are produced which are not consumed on pay TV nor SVOD, that are the main investment in terms of content. And at the same time, pay TV and SVOD are producing short content that cannot be sold or that is difficult to program, at least for the open TV programmer,” he explained after adding that now people don´t think about linear TV and think less about all the tail that can come along with a product when it is exported.

As for production, everything is concentrated in Mexico as a television and high-quality series producer market, and it is totally saturated. “There is a big disruption regarding the process to create a product. They are copied from habits in the US, and a large number of companies that are producing are supervised by American teams, therefore US mechanisms are used. All this comes like a small learning chaos,” he said.