The first event of 2025 began to take shape on its opening day, in anticipation of what is expected to be a week of great dynamics, many announcements and a high level of networking in Miami.
*By Luis Cabrera, Ana Paula Carreira and Fernando Moreno, from Miami, Florida
A first day of registration and welcoming will give way to what is expected to be a vibrant market in Miami, where Content America is hosting its 2025 edition, once again at the Hilton Miami facilities.
The event has an agenda full of conferences, meetings and even awards, but this Monday it opened its doors with a lot of work still in progress on the market floor and a large percentage of the executives attending still arriving at their suites.
The lobby showed that several of the attendees took advantage of the day to hold the first meetings of the event and, even more importantly, celebrate meeting, for the first time this year, with friends and colleagues.
Paramount celebrates 35 years of Telefe as a benchmark in Argentinian TV
Whatever area you analyze in Paramount’s current business in the Southern Cone, you will see that the company is going through an excellent moment, from Telefé’s rating records in Argentina or the current state of Chilevisión in Chile, to the development of new content in its studios, both its own and for third parties.
“We are working hard in the area of content licensing, which includes spin-off content from the Telefe and Chilevisión grid, content from our recognized IPs to generate new content from them, original co-productions, and production services, ranging from the construction of sets to production hubs,” Darío Turovelzky, EVP of Broadcast and Studios, Latam for Paramount Global, explained to ttvnews.
“These five pillars, hand in hand with a great team that we have in the company,” he added.
This great effort, the executive highlighted, is reflected in the “excellent 2024” that the group enjoyed. “For us, 2024 was a spectacular year in terms of performance, both on Telefe and Chilevisión, in terms of audiences. Telefe had one of the highest audience shares in history, reaching 45% of the audience share, a record in the broadcast television industry in Argentina.”
Healthy competition in Chile
Chilean broadcast television has returned to its best moment, at least in terms of competitiveness, something that positively impacts many areas of the audiovisual business.
Canal 13 set the course in 2024, being the channel with the greatest audience growth, with excellent results in multiple time slots: “In the morning, with quite significant growth, we went from fourth a few years ago to competing for first place,” shared Alexis Zamora, Content Manager of Canal 13. “In access, where we had a good second place years ago, we added Family Feud to the newscast. We also added a fiction in 2024 that we had not released and we made the reach of the good performance of prime time extend to almost three time slots. We wanted as a strategy that people would turn off the TV with our channel and wake up the next day with the channel as well.”
TVN, for its part, plans to continue its successful 2024 strategy in this new year, seeking to take advantage of all the good things done by titles such as Mi nombre es: “Although Mi nombre es has allowed us to be competitive in prime time, we are still lacking,” shared Javier Goldschmied, TVN Programming Manager. “Mi nombre es fulfilled the duty of positioning us as a channel in a time slot where they were not watching us and what we have to do is grow more, to be able to consolidate ourselves with an entertainment strategy.”
Launches, appointments and more news
In terms of announcements, the day served to communicate the co-production agreement between Brutal Media and Fábula, as well as the fact that TIS Studios is returning to international distribution and named Alejandro Toro as Commercial VP.
At the end of the day, Ottera and Chicas Guapas presented the FAST channel, Chicas Guapas TV, during a launch cocktail. “I am an advocate for diversity and women, and an entrepreneur. The first time I met Lucia (Ugarte) I knew that being a part of what she is building helps ensure Ottera’s legacy,” said Stephen L. Hodge, CEO of Ottera, during the presentation. “This is a very important demographic for our company. Thank you for choosing us and working with us.”
“Stephen struck me as a visionary and hearing him on the Content Americas 2024 panel inspired me to make Chicas Guapas TV a FAST channel,” added Lucia Ugarte of Chicas Guapas TV.
Talpa Studios also announced that, thanks to its partnership with Kuarzo, The Quiz Balls will arrive in Argentina, where it will have its hub for Latin America: “We have closed a new agreement for The Quiz Balls, which will be produced by Canal 13 in Argentina, but we are also aiming to have our own production hub in Argentina for The Quiz Balls and make it available in all 10 territories in the region,” said Marina Chikalovets, Format Sales Manager at Talpa Studios.
Spanish content keeps growing
Among the companies making their first appearance at Content Americas is The Ripple Effect, the global agency for the audiovisual industry, made up of the former Armoza Formats International Sales and Distribution team: Adva Avichzer as director, along with Elizaveta Makarova and Viviana Hadid.
“We want to break the established rules and try to play, to unite creators with producers and broadcasters, to start breaking the mold and see how we can all work together to really get projects ahead,” Hadid summarized.
Also making its debut in Miami is the company On Board Distribution, founded by Berta Orozco, who left Mediacrest in December to create her own distributor: “I am very happy because I have been able to put together my own catalog, which includes two distributors: Con Un Pack and Sula,” shared the executive.
Spanish content – especially fiction – is one of the safest bets in the industry today and that is why companies like Mediacrest are enjoying a great present, with titles like Asuntos Internos: “I believe that Asuntos Internos – not only as a company project, which is our flagship in fiction, our first major television fiction project – marks a milestone in terms of content from a historical part of our country,” shared Cristian Liarte, Director of Global Business Development, Acquisitions and Partners at Mediacrest Entertainment.
Latin American content seeks to imitate the success of Spanish productions, for this international co-productions are key, something that the Colombian production company Rhayuela Films knows well: “We have several co-productions in the process and one of them is active at the moment, with the Spanish company Onza,” explained Federico Durán, showrunner and executive producer of Rhayuela Films. “Part of the series takes place in Latin America and another in Spain and we are very advanced on the path to closing the financing of this project.”
With a focus on helping to monetize independent Latin American content, the Addicta TV platform is growing at a good pace: “We want to become an option for independent producers to achieve good monetization,” said Nicolás Rodríguez, CMO of the platform. “We have more than 100 hours uploaded from Argentina, Peru, Colombia and the Dominican Republic. The goal is to reach almost 1,000 hours, with content from Mexico to Argentina, covering all of Latin America.”
Technology forces innovation
Regarding technology, platforms continue to innovate in their way of attracting the audience, both with differential content and, in the case of Panea.tv, with engagement where the user is rewarded for viewing ads.
“We have a revenue share format. Every time a user views a video with commercials, we give the user a percentage of revenue share,” explained Sebastián Choy, CEO of Panea. The user accumulates points that can then be exchanged for money.
For dubbing companies, meanwhile, AI is the big issue. Tomás Silva, CEO of Dinter, is clear that it is a technology that is destined to definitively disrupt the industry: “For a matter of costs and time, AI will end up beating dubbing with actors. So we have to reinvent ourselves, take what we can from AI to speed up the dubbing processes, translations, secondary actors, soundtracks and things like that, but keeping human voices for now, until AI takes 100% of the market,” he said.
For The Kitchen, on the other hand, technology is an ally to be able to maintain a 24/7 service that takes advantage of the company’s global presence, with multiple offices around the world: “The Kitchen offers 24/7 services, since we have two hubs, one in Madrid and another here in Miami, which gives us the possibility of giving clients material early, European time, or if necessary, late with American time,” said Lilly Paéz, Sales Director for the Americas of the company.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, the second day of CA 2025 ensures a very different dynamic from the start, with a high-level conference agenda and the long-awaited closing with the Latin Rose d’Or.