Producer Looks to Link With Latinos on Internet

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Producer Looks to Link With Latinos on Internet
Mobile Move: Latin Everywhere’s Rich Hull at his publicist’s Century City office.

The man who brought hit CW show “Jane the Virgin” to American television from Venezuela is turning his attention to the Internet as a way to bring Latino content to viewers in the United States and abroad.

Latin Everywhere, an L.A. entertainment company formed by “Jane the Virgin” producer Jorge Granier and film financier Rich Hull in the summer, has targeted that market with the recent acquisition of digital distribution platform Inmoo.

The Inmoo platform, which includes a Web portal as well as smartphone and tablet apps, has been rebranded as “Pongalo,” which means “Play it” in Spanish. It will be a conduit, initially, for the more than 50,000 hours of Spanish-language telenovelas, which are a type of serialized prime-time soap opera, and feature-length films in Latin Everywhere’s library. And the platform allows Latin Everywhere to distribute the content through online distribution channels in addition to YouTube.

“We were faced with the dilemma of build it versus buy it,” said Granier, the company’s chief executive. “We liked it because it was really simple with scalable tech behind it. Ultimately, we’re better off buying something that’s tested and proven.”

Granier said Inmoo’s mobile app was a key factor in the decision to purchase the company, since more than half of Latin Everywhere’s views on YouTube originate from mobile devices.

Mobile is central to Latin Everywhere’s strategy going forward because its biggest YouTube viewer base is in Mexico, where more people use smartphones to consume entertainment than in the United States, Granier said.

Mobile media consumption is growing in the United States as well, particularly among Latinos, who represent an audience of 47 million traditional TV viewers, according to a February 2014 digital consumer report released by media tracking firm Nielsen.

Latino viewers watch nearly six-and-a-half minutes of videos on their mobile phones each day, according to the study, which is more than 30 seconds longer than the rest of the U.S. population. The gap is even wider in terms of desktop views, where Latinos watch close to eight-and-a-half minutes worth of videos compared with less than seven minutes for everyone else, according to the Nielsen study.

And there’s plenty of money in those minutes. A report in Advertising Age last year found that the U.S. Hispanic media market grew more than 8 percent to $8.3 billion in 2013. Total money spent on Internet advertising on Hispanic media jumped from $440 million to $580 million in the same period, an increase of just under 32 percent.

Different model

Programming on Latin Everywhere, which also has distribution deals with Netflix Inc., Hulu, Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc.’s Play and other subscription streaming services, boasts 50 million desktop and mobile views a month on YouTube alone. By comparison, Culver City’s Maker Studios Inc., now a unit of Walt Disney Co., receives more than 46 million unique desktop views a month, according to comScore Inc., an analytics firm in Reston, Va. Mobile viewership numbers are not accounted for in the statistics.

The Pongalo platform gives Latin Everywhere a way to add additional revenue streams through targeted ads and a premium subscription plan that’s due later this year.

The upstart is hoping to expand on that viewer base by catching traditional broadcasters catering to the Latino market flat-footed.

Spanish-language media giants such as Univision Communications Inc. and Telemundo have been slow to adapt to new online distribution models because they are too deeply rooted in old-guard television production, said Charlie Echeverry, a former executive vice president of sales for Univision Interactive Media who is now chief revenue officer at Culver City multichannel network MiTu.

“They have great content, but historically their challenge has been they’ve been unable to parlay that success into the digital ecosystem,” Echeverry said.

MiTu, whose 1,400 video creators rack up 700 million views a month, is another local company that’s made a huge push into the Latino digital entertainment market over the past two years. It has raised about $15 million in venture financing from firms including Santa Monica’s Upfront Ventures and L.A.’s Chernin Group, among others, according to Echeverry.

“From a revenue standpoint, 2014 was a four-digit percentage increase over 2013,” he said.

In December 2013, MiTu struck a deal with Univision to provide short-form content across its digital properties. It also signed a content development and distribution deal with Mexican media giant Televisa in August.

In the past year, MiTu has opened offices in Mexico City and Colombia, where teams of recruiters scour social media for local creators to sign to the network.

Additionally, Echeverry said MiTu is developing what he called a “deep insight database” about millennial Latino consumers culled from its proprietary platform and Google analytics that it plans to offer as a paid service to advertisers and research firms beginning later this year.

In terms of ad revenue, Echeverry explained that brands are attracted to MiTu’s top lifestyle creators – beauty, fashion and comedy are popular verticals – because Latino consumers are more likely to buy the products advertised.

“Brands notice that if they market to a Hispanic they get a higher lifetime value and revenue per user,” he said.

And they’re more engaged on social media, too, which has leveled the playing field when it comes to the value of Latino content to digital marketers, said Andy Nelson, director of social media and content production at Conill Advertising in El Segundo.

“Once they’re inside these social channels, Hispanics overindex in how many brands they follow,” said Nelson, who has worked with brands such as Toyota Motor Corp. and T-Mobile USA Inc. to craft branded videos with top Latino influencers on YouTube.

Digital coup

Latin Everywhere’s Granier and Hull had known each other socially for a few years before starting their venture.

Granier started a company called GoTV in October 2013 as he was winding down his four-year stint as managing director of RCTV International in Miami, the foreign sales arm of Venezuelan cable broadcaster Radio Caracas TV. In 2008, the Venezuelan government kicked the company, founded by Granier’s family more than a century ago, off the air, accusing it of participating in a 2002 coup attempt against then-President Hugo Chavez.

When he started working at the Miami office in 2010, Granier knew the Internet could serve as the perfect way to get the company’s massive library to wider audiences around the globe, but the turmoil within RCTV proved too difficult to overcome. It soon became apparent to him that he needed to strike out on his own in order to maximize the catalog’s online earning potential.

“I convinced them to give me the digital rights,” Granier said. “I tried to do it in-house, but there were a lot of people that had to be let go. It was a very traumatic and difficult situation.”

In addition to pursuing digital distribution, he also began to shop licensing rights to American film and TV studios, which is how CBS Television Studios and CW came to acquire the remake rights to “Jane the Virgin” in late 2013, a Venezuelan telenovela about a young woman who becomes accidentally impregnated by artificial insemination. The show had originally been produced by RCTV.

Hull, meanwhile, was serving as chief executive of Latin Anywhere Inc. in Los Angeles, where he sourced and led an investment group’s acquisition of more than 1,000 Spanish-language films.

A year after the two met, the pair knew they had to find a way to work together. They wound up merging their two companies to form Latin Everywhere.

“We realized we were better together than we were apart,” Hull said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story reported that MiTu’s creators receive 60 million monthly views.

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