Today the audiovisual industry presents us with a great challenge. The panorama is challenging, fluctuating and dynamic but at the same time more than interesting. After my time at the Disney company and since my incursion with my own production company from the project La Suerte de Loli, licensed to Telemundo, everything was a vast learning experience and affirming a fascination for this industry which I came to stay.
With changes of roles in executive positions, mergers between large conglomerates and a scheme that is not yet fully profitable for the large SVOD companies, especially in our region, today the constant search is to make a business work that paradoxically cannot stop growing.
After a stage of multiple confirmations of the “green light” of production for large projects, today the announcements talk about reducing budgets for originals, quieting down that verbiage of the past a bit to give way to quality and not so much to quantity. Collaborative schemes (co-productions) are increasingly growing. And on the other hand, the hotbed of new content creators with great ideas, as well as good scriptwriters, look for those who have already traveled in this industry and understand how to approach the analysts and decision makers of the big platforms. And above all “how” and “when” everything is given and ready to do it.
In this sense, at SDO we have that experience to advise those who are taking off and also for fellow producers who need to adjust their projects and prepare them to be able to reach a development analyst. With solid alliances, such as Glowstar by Silvana D’Angelo, with whom I share creative consultancies (Las malqueridas, Ecuavisa project), and Maria José Riera from Art Troupe (What a father is my family on VIX+). The SDO distribution area has a catalog of films, with actors of the caliber of Mariano Martinez, Rodrigo Guirao (Humo bajo el agua), Nancy Duplaa and Carolina Ramirez (Unicornio), both from Midú/Junco, and Chocolate for three (Sanchez and Casalia). We are also working on a documentary called Mujeres en el espectro by Manada Producciones.
The commercialization of content has already produced an opportunity for sellers and producers. But now also for the big streamers, who have already announced that they will no longer retain the series, documentaries and films in their ecosystems, but will market them to other potential buyers.
We are at a time, where we must be attentive to the changes that are coming and how the equation will end up being assembled. The podcast appears today as a very tempting format for SVOD production companies and platforms that are beginning to venture into this model with fiction projects, bringing good scriptwriters and attractive talent to audiences. A clear example is the already very successful Amazon Music release Número oculto by the production company K&S with a script by Carlos Wasserman, acting by Cande Vetrano and directed by Peter Lanzani.
For its part, AVOD is growing more and more, and everything would indicate that the future is a hybrid model. We are all attentive in the industry to find out how the exercise of adding this mixed scheme to 100% turns out, to the SVOD model to which Netflix has so accustomed us and which today competes with other large platforms such as Prime, Disney, Paramount and HBO among others. And let’s not even talk about the churn (churn rate). The search and the challenge is no longer to add new subscribers but the difficult task of maintaining them. Will the jumping user finally choose a service to stay for a long time? How will user loyalty be achieved? Are they offered packages (bundles) with more tempting prices? What other new business models will come?
Many questions in an industry that is constantly growing but has great challenges to overcome.
*Director of SDO Entertainment.
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