Argentina's Mancha Prods. is taking a fresh approach to secure exposure and build business by targeting Internet fiction, a market with growth potential, and tying it to a newspaper's website.
Last month the two-year-old company launched "Combinaciones" (Combinations), a twice-weekly series about life in the Buenos Aires subway system. It is airing 8-12 minute episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays on the website of Buenos Aires newspaper La Nacion.
Episodes follow romances, affairs, med students arguing over how to help a choking victim and two tango-musician vampires stuck on the subway until night falls.
The show stars locally well-known actors Luis Ziembrowski ("Suddenly) and Violeta Urtizberea ("Lalola") and musicians including Bahiano and Kevin Johansen.
This is Mancha's second online series following two seasons of cruise ship-based "Embarcados" for MSN.
"It is hard to get airtime on TV in Latin America because the schedules are saturated," says Mancha producer Leo Zanutto. "But demand is growing for programs for the Internet."
Latin America is seeing a surge in original productions, and as a result, indie TV production companies are fighting to get their content on air. The Internet solves that problem.
"On the Internet, people can see your program and you can see how many people saw it and liked it" through Facebook and Twitter, Zanutto says.
"Combinations" is La Nacion's first fiction series. "It gives free entertainment to readers, and this helps increase traffic and create loyalty," Zanutto says.
The producer expects to recover its $113,000 budget through a share of ad sales in La Nacion. He will also sell the series to other markets, such as Colombia and Mexico.
"If we get clicks and good comments, we can do a second season on a regional scale," Zanutto says. "I am convinced there is a market for these programs because of the rising number of cell phones, laptops, iPads and other devices."
The main platforms for such shows remain broadcast and cable in Latin America, says Carlos Blanco, an analyst at NexTV, a consulting firm in Buenos Aires.
So far, broadcasters have been using the Internet to offer shortened versions of past episodes of popular shows so that viewers can catch up on what they missed. There are no streaming media players in the region like Hulu, and only a few VOD models sprouting up like Bazuca.com and VTR in Chile, he says.
"YouTube gets a lot of traffic but it's not like Hulu in the U.S.," Blanco adds."You can't depend on the Internet alone."
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