Bruce Boren and Darren Childs

World Screen Weekly, July 17, 2008

Since joining BBC Worldwide in 2005 from Sony Pictures Television International, Darren Childs, the managing director of BBC Worldwide Channels, has been steadily building the company’s channels business around the world. Childs’ revamped strategy for the BBC’s worldwide channel presence kicked off in India with BBC Entertainment and CBeebies, and a five-channel portfolio—alongside BBC Knowledge, BBC Lifestyle and BBC World News—is now on offer in several Asian markets. The expansion has continued into Europe, with a launch in Poland towards the end of last year. For Childs, the next key market was Latin America, a region where, thus far, the BBC’s presence has been confined to the radio and TV news services and to its content appearing on third-party broadcasters.

To tackle the challenges of the Latin American market, and take full advantage of the opportunities available, the BBC this week announced a deal with Televisa Networks, which will be distributing BBC Entertainment and CBeebies to Spanish-speaking markets region wide. “From our perspective, we’re just ecstatic that we’ve been able to get together with a company like Televisa to help us fulfil our ambitions in Latin America,” Childs said in an exclusive interview last week. “I couldn’t wish for any better partner.”

BBC Entertainment and CBeebies were selected as the initial services to be carried in Latin America, Childs explains, because the company “wanted to make sure that we added something that was unique and distinctive in order to demonstrate value to pay-television operators right across the region. We decided to really focus on bringing two channels which both Televisa and BBC thought would have the best chance of being successful. It was a decision that was made jointly with their local market expertise to guide us into the marketplace.”

Childs adds that both channels will go a long way towards “reinvigorating” the BBC brand in Latin America, positioning it as “more contemporary than it maybe gets credit for in some international markets.”

The rollout is expected to begin in Mexico later this year. “Once you light up Mexico, you light up the whole region,” Televisa Networks’ CEO, Bruce Boren, tells World Screen on how he sees the two BBC channels progressing across Latin America. “The Southern Cone is probably going to take a little bit longer to develop. It just really depends on what kind of interest [there is from] the big operators in the Southern Cone, principally Cablevisi�n and Multicanal in Argentina, which we’ve already had discussions with.”

Boren, who has been driving the expansion of Televisa’s own suite of pay-TV channels, is expecting strong interest from operators for the two BBC services. “We’re obviously very excited to be able to offer them, because they don’t compete with anything we have—they’re complementary to our lineups.”

The move into third-party channel representation is a new one for Televisa. The decision, Boren explains, “has everything to do with the quality of the BBC’s content. We now have a preschool channel, which we haven’t done in the past and don’t have any content internally to do, and also a channel with all the great general-entertainment programming that the BBC already produces. If we went out into the marketplace and tried to acquire all this content and launch the channel ourselves, it would be really prohibitive.”

Boren concedes that there are challenges in the marketplace—“all the operators in Latin America are saturated and [many] of them are still analogue, so it’s even harder to get channels carried”—but notes that Televisa has long-standing ties with the region’s pay-TV players. “A lot of these operators have gone through several different crises over the last 10 to 15 years. Coming into today when the region is much better suited for growth and has been [growing] for the last three to four years in most countries, it’s important not only to have a wide range of channels but also to have been there, to have contact with them and to have good relationships.”

To ensure that the services appeal to audiences in the region, Childs explains that local teams will be assembled to handle the programming and on-air creative. “We’ll have an editorial team in place that will be making all of those decisions for us, selecting the content from the BBC’s vast archives that they think will best resonate with those audiences, and also making sure the environment in which it sits and all the communications around it are totally focused on local audiences. We go in on a market-by-market, country-by-country basis to ensure that our channels are completely focused on delivering large audiences in each market in which they operate.”

CBeebies will be dubbed into Spanish, with an option for viewers on digital platforms to choose the original English-language audio. BBC Entertainment, meanwhile, will be subtitled.

Boren and Childs both stress that the deal for BBC Entertainment and CBeebies is just the beginning of what is expected to be a much bigger alliance between the two companies. “The ambition for us is that eventually we will have the full suite of services available across Latin America,” Childs says.

Magazines, home entertainment and merchandising are other areas in which the two companies could cooperate, both executives note. “It’s limitless,” Childs says. “There are actually a lot of similarities between BBC Worldwide and Televisa. The more time we spend together, it’s a very natural fit. We’re feeling very positive about this and we’re just looking forward to what the next 10, 15 or 20 years are going to bring as we work together in these markets.”

—By Mansha Daswani