U.S. HISPANIC
José Antón, Atresmedia in #PRODUprimetime: I’ve been one of the biggest buyers of Latin American great productions
Maribel Ramos-Weiner| 11 de febrero de 2022
José Antón de Atresmedia
With 25 years of experience in the industry, José Antonio Antón, Deputy Director of Content at Atresmedia, has been passionate about the audiovisual world and content since he was a child. He has been involved in many areas of the business such as programming design, production, acquisitions, and distribution. “I was always sure that I wanted to devote my career to this business,” he said to Ríchard Izarra in a new edition of #PRODUprimetime.
Is a Pleasure to Work in Atresmedia
In his ten years tenure, he always has had something new and different to do in Atresmedia, which makes him grow. “We want to work on producing more, we are always looking for a production company, or creating our OTT, or making strategic agreements with Televisa to launch a hybrid proposal –as they are working on now-. In this decade Atresmedia has been really making it a place where it is a pleasure to work and where opportunities are continually renewed”.
The company has experienced important growth in OTT and digital in that time. Anton assures that they are in a very good moment regarding audiences in linear and in the volume of production, as well as in new platforms with their own OTT, which has both sides: VOD and SVOD. “We have developed a very recent production strategy for originals, which I think hasn’t been replicated in Spain yet”.
Audiences
For Antón, the behavior of TV audiences has changed in the last 10 years. For 25 years his ritual every morning is watching the audience’s behavior and has realized that viewers, “right now have more and more options and they spend more time on audiovisual content”. This was not the case in Spain three decades ago, there were very few channels, and “now there are not only many more television channels but there are many on pay-TV and you have almost infinite options in the world: internet, OTTs”.
This means many points of connection with the audience that allows, “once I have connected with my audience with linear programs, I can also take them to my own on-demand environment, and draw a kind of perfect circle in which we become a content production company that makes the users have access to it in many ways”.
Good Content
Antón explains that what makes content good is its high quality, both in news, entertainment, and fiction. “Fiction for us has always been our identity brand. I think that since the birth of Antena 3, we have bet very strongly on it; and again, high-quality fiction, but that at the same time connects with the audience”. He added that all this “volume of variety, quality, diversity, has been increased recently with our OTT platform, which has allowed us to do both fiction, entertainment or non-fiction within areas that are harder to make visible.”
Windows
Being a content production company, Atresmedia leverages promoting all the windows that they consider could help their product be profitable. “Now it’s not about ‘I broadcast it and forget it, but to generate assets, IPs, audiovisual content that has enough quality to be able to develop a lifetime of it allowing us, on the one hand, to make it more profitable, but also on the other, to undertake productions of higher level, because as we are able to make them more profitable, we can take on projects that perhaps before, with a single exploitation window, could seem too ambitious”.
It is what he calls a virtuous circle, in which they launch a product and begin to move through different windows, although he assures that not all content has to reach all the windows. “With a certain product, we decided not to pre-release it because we consider that it has to be broadcast first on linear or with others it could not be distributed in one of a large international OTT.”
ATRESplayer
Atresmedia in Spain has been, in his opinion, the place where Latin American production has found a special place. Their Nova channel is largely dedicated to Latin American products. “We have a very important agreement with Televisa, and within our Atresplayer platform, we have an SVOD boutique, an environment where we have a fundamentally Latino product, called Novelas Nova.”
On the other hand, they also distribute their content through international channels, with which they have agreements and reach 50 million homes in the world, mainly in Latin America and the US. These include Antena 3 Internacional, Atreseries, and Atrescine. “We feel that affection and that connection with Latin America, which has a very important component in the language, but also in the cultural connections.”
Latin America & Spain
The exchange between Latin America and Spain is bidirectional, “because being on the two sides of the business, one is about production and preparing a local and international proposal, but I am also in the position of having the best content to offer in Spain”. Such is the case of the connection with Latin American production companies to have Latin content access for the channels. “It connects us with Latin America and with the Spanish audience that wants to see quality products from the American continent.”
Antón said that he has been one of the great buyers of Latin American productions, not only for being in the position to do it – first as director of Acquisitions at TVE and later as director of Antena, and head of programming-, but “because in the end there is a very good product and creators in Latin America, both at the television and cinema level”, he said.
Ríchard Izarra recalled that for some years they have been talking about the increasingly solid double-track bridge that has been built between Latin America and Spain. For Anton, “this bridge is very important, and it is key to work on it together.”
View interview here
