Telemundo Internacional’s Marcos Santana

June 2007

By María Teresa Alvarado

Marcos Santana is recognized as an expert in the telenovela business. He spent two decades at Tepuy International, a leading producer and distributor of high-end telenovelas. In addition to its other productions, Tepuy distributed novelas produced by Telemundo, the Spanish-language broadcast network in the U.S. that is owned by NBC Universal. Late last year, Tepuy was integrated into Telemundo and renamed Telemundo Internacional, and Santana was appointed its president. He is charged not only with building on Telemundo’s reputation for excellence in the novela genre, but also with seeking out new business opportunities in the digital world.

TV NOVELAS: What is your biggest challenge now that you are part of a major media company?

SANTANA: Telemundo Internacional is, of course, a company with its own identity. My challenge is to develop and position it internationally the same way Tepuy was positioned. We are also planning to develop new businesses that we didn’t have before, such as strategic alliances with networks, our own channels—something that we are working on very closely with NBC Universal in Asia, Europe and Latin America—and expanding into home entertainment, mobile and online. Telemundo Internacional launched an international digital-media division dedicated to new media. [We have completed] restructuring the company and building the content factory, because without content there is no international market, and we will now be completely focused on building from scratch our international unit and working with the rest of the company’s units.

TV NOVELAS: What kind of strategic alliances are you looking for?

SANTANA: We want to create channels for DTT [digital terrestrial television] platforms. We are working to establish alliances with channels, either through branded blocks of our content and/or by starting up our own channels. To that end, we are exploring the possibility of having our own channel in Mexico and Colombia.

TV NOVELAS: What are Telemundo’s plans for new media?

SANTANA: We are adapting the telenovela format for mobile, Internet and home video. For example, we are making 40-second capsules of our novelas, edited almost as slide shows in low resolution so they can be easily distributed. Phone companies can offer Pasión de gavilanes in daily short-form capsules. We can also create contests around that, through SMS text messages that provide more interactivity for users.

We are placing daily summaries of our novelas on our website so that people who don’t have the time to watch them on TV can follow developments online. Advertisers actively participate in that. We are also working on ring tones of telenovelas. The most downloaded one in Spain was from Pasión de gavilanes. It did even better than Shakira. In addition, through our unit Discos Telemundo, each telenovela has its own soundtrack. So I believe the telenovela genre can take advantage of as many windows as any other kind of content, if done properly.

TV NOVELAS: Do you have plans to develop telenovelas targeted to a young audience?

SANTANA: The U.S. Hispanic audience is very different from the Latin American audience. It’s not like Mexico or Argentina, where Rebelde Way turned out to be a hit. In the U.S., Rebelde Way did well, but it didn’t have the same success as La fea más bella or Destilando amor. That’s because the bulk of our viewers are adults. They are the ones who immigrate; the teens were born here. The children of Hispanic families are educated in the American environment. For us, that audience is very small, because they grew up with American TV and their only connection with the Spanish language is when it’s spoken at home. That’s why [the U.S. Hispanic networks] Univision and Telemundo have those characteristics. And that’s why we neither schedule nor produce kids’ blocks, except for what is required by law.

TV NOVELAS: Telemundo’s novelas are aired almost simultaneously in different territories. What drove that decision?

SANTANA: Four or five years ago, Telemundo started distributing its novelas very aggressively, almost in parallel [in several different markets]. The main reason is that we have an established time slot on several channels and many of them keep it parallel with ours, with a delay period of four or five weeks. So once our telenovela concludes, they still have it for five weeks, and then they present the next one we launch.

TV NOVELAS: Why did you take the Telemundo International channel off the air?

SANTANA: We considered it an expired business model. We realized that it made no sense to have a broadcast channel for cable, which is what we had and what many others have done. Pay TV is much more targeted. Cable channels have to differentiate themselves from broadcasters if they want to be attractive for their subscribers. We are planning to create niche channels with our content that are tailored to each market. We can have a channel that airs four or five of our telenovelas, plus novelas from other distributors, in addition to programming designed for a specific market. That’s what I mean when I talk about alliances. We offer the market our content, our strength and experience, and the power that NBC Universal has in each market. That’s what makes alliances attractive.