Hemisphere Media Group Buys Majority Stake in Snap

Hemisphere Media Group has acquired a 75 percent stake in Ariel Tobi’s Snap Media and entered into a co-production joint venture with MarVista Entertainment.

Snap was founded in 2009 in association with MarVista Entertainment as an independent production and distribution company. Snap tripled MarVista’s distribution business in Latin America and boosted its own distribution business by acquiring a catalog for the region.

As part of the investment, Hemisphere and MarVista will be co-producing new original productions together. 

Tobi will be joining the Hemisphere team as senior VP of distribution and programming.

“We’re thrilled to be acquiring a majority interest in Snap Media,” said Alan J. Sokol, President and CEO of Hemisphere. “Content distribution is an important strategic asset, and we are confident that our resources and combined expertise will accelerate Snap’s growth and position it as the leading independent distributor of Hispanic content. Our partnership with MarVista will facilitate the expansion of our original production strategy, and provide us with world-class content that we can exploit on our networks and platforms and syndicate to existing and emerging platforms.”

“We are proud to join the Hemisphere family,” added Tobi. “We look forward to expanding Hemisphere’s international business through strategic global alliances to produce and distribute premium content worldwide, securing Hemisphere’s position as a leading global production, distribution and media company.”

“Given Hemisphere’s strength in navigating the Latin American and U.S. distribution landscapes and MarVista’s expertise in bringing unique stories and new voices to the global marketplace with efficient development and production operations, we feel our partnership with Hemisphere provides a natural evolution for our expansion,” said MarVista CEO Fernando Szew. “Our Joint Venture will deepen our ties to the Latin American region and help us introduce untapped creative visions and talent to the world.”

Previously, Snap and Hemisphere collaborated on the international distribution of the five-part narco drama El Desconocido, la Historia del Cholo Adrian. The series was produced by Hemisphere’s Spanish-language cable movie network Cinelatino and licensed to Netflix in early 2018.