Speaking Spanish: The U.S. Hispanic Opportunity

Karsten Amlie, senior VP of content distribution and general counsel at Canela Media, showcased trends in FAST usage among Spanish-language audiences in the U.S. as the third edition of the FAST Festival came to a close today.

Last month, Canela’s FAST slate topped 6 million monthly viewing hours, an 88 percent increase on last year. Amlie shared Canela’s approach to serving Spanish-language audiences in the U.S. and across Latin America via FAST and on-demand services in a session you can watch here.

“There are over 40 million Spanish speakers in the U.S., and that’s not including the bilingual,” Amlie said. “Our focus is on the content we provide to the audience we know, and getting them to come back to Canela.TV again and again. We do that through a variety of methods, whether it’s our original content or acquired content. Our content team really knows the audience.”

The channels are available on the Canela.TV AVOD platform as well as via an array of third-party operators. “We have different strategies for each,” distribution partner Amlie said. The slate of 20 channels runs across novelas, movies, sports, kids, factual and more.

“Our third-party distributors, when we’re talking with their content teams, are fundamentally marketers themselves. We track all the data there. We’re tracking the performance with our partners. We’re programming to maximize that audience and reach. Our content team does a remarkable job of getting content that hits different demographics.”

Data is at the core of how the company makes strategic and content decisions, Amlie noted. “We track it very extensively on our own platform. Some platforms are better at delivering data than others. We like to get as granular as possible. We’d love to get down to it by the minute if we could. We use it to inform the design of the product every day.”

Canela Media has been using YouTube as a way to drive engagement, especially with its originals. “We have a plethora of different rights. Some of our shows, we’ll actually put out for people to sample on YouTube. So, it’s a mixture of content, development and marketing.”

Addressing the discoverability challenge in general, Amlie discussed how the platform restructured its content rails in menus that “prioritize our high-performing and time-sensitive titles, but then on the other side, we’re also getting favorites that have been there forever and classic content. So still [providing] that lean-back-and-enjoy experience, but then also more engaging content that maybe they wouldn’t have sampled before. That’s on our platform. On other platforms, it’s driven by great marketing.”

For the year ahead, Amlie is prioritizing scaling its FAST channel footprint, driving usage time and capitalizing on viewership trends with seasonal channels.

“We plan to launch new channels targeting underserved audiences within the U.S. Hispanic market. We’re all getting better at using technology to deliver a better product to the consumer. At the same time, at the end of the day, the authenticity is what the consumer realizes when they come to Canela.”