10 Little Room to Improve, But RX Managed to Make it Even Better One piece of news that came out on MIP Cancun’s first market day from the large contingent of top-level Turkish TV executives in attendance was that the idea of organizing a TV market in Istanbul in early 2025 had been scrapped. Turkish distributors were in attendance in droves, including ATV’s Muge Akar, Calinos’ Firat Gulgen, Global Agency’s Izzet Pinto and his COO Pamir Guroglu, Inter Medya’s Can Okan and Beatriz Cea Okan, Kanal D’s Elif Tatoglu, and MediaHub’s Kerim Emrah Turna, among others. A large number of top-level LatAm acquisition executives were also in attendance. Among these were Albavision’s Marcel Vinay, TV Azteca’s Pedro Lascurain, Canal 10 Uruguay’s Patricia Daujotas, Ana Cecilia Alvarado of Ecuador’s Ecuavisa, Hemisphere Media Group’s Jimmy Arteaga Grustein, Mexicobased Imagen TV’s Programming director Erick Pulido, and Dustin Guerra, the new general director of SERTV (the state-owned public broadcaster channel in Panama). The talk at this year’s MIP Cancun wasn’t about the upcoming TV markets to be held in January in Miami, but the walk was most certainly about the inaugural MIP London in February. Roaming the MIP Cancun Moon Palace Convention Center’s halls was Manuel De Sousa from the New York office of RX, which organizes both MIP Cancun and MIP London. De Sousa made a MIP London presentation in the afternoon of the conference’s first day and the message was that MIP London is having much success among Latin American distribution entities, and that more than 250 companies from 36 countries have already signed up. This latest 11th annual MIP Cancun registered a record number of 28 first-time exhibiting companies, including Paris-based Animaj and Tokyo’s TBS Television. Other first-timers were Alejandro Veciana, who represented MIP Cancun veteran New York City-based FilmRise (and was licensing FAST and AVoD rights for LatAm), and Liz Levenson of the Los Angeles-based GRB Media Ranch. There were a total of 115 distributor tables for 108 companies (some had multiple tables), and 750 delegates from 40 countries. The pace was hectic, partially due to the fact that intermittent pouring rain kept most participants inside the convention center. The inclement weather also caused the Internet at the adjacent hotel to go on and off on the first market day. The market welcomed over 200 buyers, all major Hollywood studios, and featured a varied conference line-up, with the focus on how to monetize FAST and AVoD channels. The conference came as research showed Latin America boasting one of the world’s highest shares of premium video advertising across FAST and AVoD, and predicted that Brazil will become the third largest FAST market globally (after only the U.S. and the U.K.) by 2029. Among this year’s delegates was Ana Cecilia Alvarado, who was not in attendance as the CEO of Ecuavisa with the traditional buyer’s laundry list for her TV network — her team was tasked with that mission this time around — but as vice president, International Strategy and Talents for Be Experimental, a group that was promoting a 37 percent return on the expenditures of any production shot in Ecuador. Comments from buyers can be narrowed down to one from a prominent acquisition executive who adored the concept of pre-set meetings with those distributors who paid for tables (and were therefore covered for all hotel expenses), but faulted some of the exhibitors to whom he was assigned who didn’t do their homework. “If I end up with a distributor who licenses documentaries, and I only buy drama series, it’s going to be a halfhour of wasted time for me,” he said. On the other hand, Doris Vogelmann of the Miami-based VME Media said that in this regard “she’s fortunate because she buys all kinds of content, with the exception of movies (for now).” Jimmy Arteaga Grustein, head of Acquisitions at Puerto Rico’s WAPA-TV, as well as CCO of Hemisphere Media Group, considered this latest MIP Cancun “better than the previous one. For the first time,” he explained, “us buyers could reject meetings with distributors who didn’t have the content we wanted.” In order to receive all-expenses-paid invitations (which included accommodations and airfare), buyers had to agree to a set number of pre-scheduled meetings, and, if they failed to show up to those meetings the organizers charged them for the expenses incurred on their behalf. On the distributors’ side, a welcomed element at MIP Cancun was the reduced number of so-called collectors, who were tasked with the job of gathering information about the availability and prices of various programs from content exhibitors, but who were not actually able to make any decisions about acquisitions for their companies. One observation, which was widely shared, was about the poor attendance at the various screenings, which tended to be held in early mornings, at lunch time, and just before dinner — which resulted in low buyer attendance since market participants used those time periods for business meetings. “Perhaps, looking into different time slots and reducing the screenings to half-hours could be a better option,” said one distributor who had scheduled an evening screening. One of MIP Cancun’s components (in addition to the market, conferences, and coproduction hub) was a selection of special screenings. Global Agency, Inter Medya, Calinos Entertainment, and VIP 2000 all held screenings of their newest series. As to recreational activities, the Worldwide Audiovisual Women’s Association (WAWA) hosted a breakfast get-together for 80 of its members. Other parties included a MIP Cancun-organized pre-market drinks celebration, an opening night party, and a closing party that was held in the main hotel of the Moon Palace resort instead of the convention center, where it took place in years past. MIP Cancun 2025 is set for November 1821, however the organizers are considering moving it to the month of April in 2026. Ecuavisa’s Ana Cecilia Alvarado VIDEOAGE January 2025 MIP Cancun Review
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