26 My 2¢ November 2024 TV trade magazines in LatAm are thriving. The LatAm region is going through a dramatic economic crisis, but not for the several printed and online-only LatAm international TV trade publications from Miami, Argentina, and Uruguay — the same number of those printed in Europe, U.S., Canada and Asia combined — for the international TV sector, focused on content buying and selling. The television sector is growing in Europe, the U.S., Canada, and Asia, and retracting in Latin America, with only a handful of large production and distribution companies remaining that have a marketing and promotion budget, but nevertheless the international TV sector is covered by a plethora of LatAm trade publications. They can be seen at almost every TV trade show, from Miami to Toledo, to Budapest, to Cape Town, to Buenos Aires, to Cannes, to Singapore, and of course here at MIP Cancun. Let us be prepared to see them in London next year, and if those planned TV markets are realized, in Istanbul and Toronto. Meanwhile, to complement VideoAge’s LatAm coverage, we selected The Daily Television as the premiere Spanish-language online-only publication to monitor and report on hard to find LatAm TV industry news. This success is contrasted with a wave of trade magazine closures in Europe and the U.S. On June 6, 2024, Informa, the U.K. publishing group, announced that it was closing its TBI TV trade magazine after more than 35 years of publication. Two months later, on August 6, the U.K. media company Future announced that it was closing both its Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News. Based in Washington, D.C., Broadcasting was born in 1931, and in 1941 became a weekly. In 1986, Times Mirror acquired Broadcasting for $75 million from its publisher Sol Taishoff’s son Larry. In 1991, it was sold to Cahners (later, Reed Business, the organizer of MIPTV and MIPCOM) for $32 million. In 1993, it became Broadcasting & Cable. In 2009, Broadcasting & Cable was sold to New Bay Media for an undisclosed sum. And in 2018, Future Plc acquired New Bay Media. After a few years, the publication’s print schedule became erratic, and in 2020 it was printed mostly monthly. As per September 30, 2024 Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News ceased publication. As for TBI, it was founded by the American journalist Les Brown in 1988 and was perhaps inspired by VideoAge’s onetime subtitle: “The Business Journal of Television.” TBI went through various ownerships before it was taken over by Informa, a business research and exhibitions group based in London, U.K. Among the remaining TV trade market publications that print regularly are C21, VideoAge, and, as we have indicated above, a slew of Latin America-based publications, with VideoAge also publishing printed market dailies. Dom Serafini International TV trade publications are closing down in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, while many Canadian trade mags have been reduced to online-only. But in Latin America, they’re thriving. “Excuse me, can I borrow that magazine you’re sitting on?”
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