The EVP of Telemundo Studios spoke with ttvnews at Natpe Global about the recent restructuring of the group, the executive additions that have strengthened the team, and the new content they have prepared for 2025.
*By Luis Cabrera, from Miami
One of the strongest and most recognized Hispanic media groups in the international market, NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises owes this strength to a team of professionals who work together in each leg of the business to bring the best content to its audience.
“It is a great coordination with our screen,” Javier Pons, EVP of Telemundo Studios, began in a conversation with ttvnews. “We have organized the studios and focused on deeply understanding the evolution of our audience and what the audience expects from our franchises, series and projects.”
“The work of consolidating the studio into a single brand, which projects all types of content, long-form, docuseries and films, is the greatest achievement we have achieved in this short time, in which we have also paid attention to dynamizing our structure,” continued the executive. “Because the market is completely changing, we needed a dynamic, flexible structure, empowering the management area a lot.”
In this sense, the executive highlighted important additions to the team, such as Monica Albuquerque, Jacky Castro or Juan Ponce, among others.
“We have combined different elements that each one contributes to face the future. A future in which we focus on a strategy that cannot be other than that of the company to which we belong: Playing with the offensive,” emphasized the executive. “We are not going to wait to see what the market does or where it wants to take us. We want to have the initiative, to mark our own path within this changing world that we are living in.”
“We have a consolidated vision to take off. Creating more IPs is the key to any audiovisual company. The company has that mission and the studios have that mission too,” he added.
For 2025, the group already has “a defined pipeline,” where in terms of fiction, productions such as La jefa, the remake of the Spanish series Velvet, or Dinastía Casillas, the continuation of the El señor de los cielos franchise, stand out.
“La jefa is a fast-paced story of a woman who has to make a personal arc, traveling to the world of darkness, to protect her son. It is an attractive and dynamic story, with a cast that mixes youth and experience,” said the executive.
“Then comes, without a doubt, what has generated the most buzz, which is the adaptation of Velvet. When we thought about Velvet, we couldn’t do it any other way. Bring it to the current world, make it contemporary, work so that the Latin audiences in the US see reflected in its characters a series of social themes that did not exist in the original, which is a basic guide to our DNA. There is a lot of luxury, a lot of romance, which is the axis of the novel, but also another series of elements that will undoubtedly make it different from the original, but just as attractive,” revealed the EVP.
“And finally, we always seek to elevate our franchises, we don’t want to exhaust them. And Dinastía Casillas is a great example, because it is revisiting the franchise but refreshed, adapting the elements that most appeal to the audience from the 9 successful seasons, but with a new complementary cast and a vision that makes it a franchise in itself,” he concluded.
