Agustin Sacanell Lucas Rainelli
Kapow, created by Agustín Sacanell and Lucas Rainelli, turned two decades old in November and celebrated with a toast joined by industry members, partners, and actors who have worked with the production company. They began as a production and post-production services company for pay TV channels (MTV and Nickelodeon were their first clients).
In 2008, Kapow developed its first original content: Cocineros Argentinos, still airing on TV Pública. 2012 was another significant year for the company, going further with its expansion process and reaching new markets with its original content. Prominent formats were born such as Cocineros Latinos, Cocineros Mexicanos, Cocineros Chilenos, Cocineros Bolivianos, Cocineros Uruguayos, Está cantado Perú and Reto de campeones, among others.
2015 was the year of its great leap into fiction with Stockholm, which they co-produced with StoryLab and was the first Argentine series broadcast on Netflix. Followed by successful series such as the two seasons of El Presidente along with Fábula and Gaumont for Amazon Prime Video, and they began working for different platforms such as Disney+, Star+, Paramount+, and HBO Max.
In 2018, Kapow reached important co-production alliances that allowed it to expand into markets such as Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Spain. This collaborative system empowered the company to develop titles such as El Presidente and La Jauría for Amazon, Terapia Alternativa, Los Protectores, December 2001 for Star+, and Nahir for Paramount+, among others.
In 2021, it closed a merger with América Televisión de Perú, where the Peruvian group acquired 50.1% of the production company, with the joint objective of going further into the path of internationalization and expansion into new markets.
“In the last ten years, the industry has changed a lot, processes have accelerated, and the production company has had to adapt. They were times of a lot of learning and developing a capacity for constant adaptation to the new challenges imposed on us. We are a production company that learned based on our experiences more than anything else because there were no places or educational spaces to train as they exist now,” recalled Sacanell, who stressed that they discovered the importance of intellectual property and understanding that their ideas had value as they moved forward.
“The advent of the platforms forced us to leap our content and production quality. It forced us to have higher standards to be competitive,” he added.
To do so, they had to go through a complete restructuring of the production company. They began to understand the process of developing a project that aspired to a certain internationality, how it had to look aesthetically, how it had to tell a story, and how to get rid of certain localisms that are key for some markets but counterproductive for others.
He said the platforms entered the market with a full wallet and kept the IPs. But now they opt for a more associative model where the production companies can keep the IP. “And we as a producer have a great associative capacity and have done it many times.”
ACQUISITION OF AMERICA TV
Regarding the acquisition of América TV del Perú, he highlighted that for more than 25 years, it has been the leading channel in the country, with studios in Pachacamac on the outskirts of Lima. Between the two companies, the challenge is to generate a regional production company and leverage its expertise in content development, combined with the excellent infrastructure that Grupo América has to achieve a dominant position in the region and generate a production hub.
“We believe that Peru has great competitive costs, great infrastructure, and now in Congress is a production incentive law that will probably be approved in 2024,” said Sacanell, who announced that the idea is to produce telenovelas, a genre that is coming back.
They are currently working on two important projects for platforms with renowned casts, but they cannot give any details yet.
