Estrella Media continues growth within spanish-speaking streaming industry

Peter Markham, the Chief Executive Officer of Estrella Media joined Yahoo Finance to discuss growth within spanish speaking streaming.

Video Transcript

JULIA LA ROCHE: So I want to bring into the stream now our next guest. Peter Markham, Chief Executive Officer of Estrella Media. You're producing more than 2,500 hours annually of original TV programming from its Empire Burbank television studios. The company is one of the largest producers of Spanish language TV content. Peter, thank you so much for joining us. And I want to talk about the opportunity that you all are going after and what you make of the streaming landscape today and where you can fill gaps in the opportunities that you're going after.

PETER MARKHAM: Sure, absolutely, and thank you for having me on the program. I think importantly, it's framing out the opportunity in the US for the Hispanic marketplace. As you may know, there's 60 million Hispanics in the US, with that number is growing much faster than the non-Hispanic marketplace.

So we are very focused on programming to that audience that is not only fast growing, it's much younger than the general market population. The average US Hispanic is 29 versus 41. So as you can imagine, it is a digital first consumer, it's a mobile first consumer, and importantly, they're building wealth as they establish themselves and grow older in this US economy and are driving the growth. Very much focused on--

ADAM SHAPIRO: Peter.

PETER MARKHAM: Yes.

ADAM SHAPIRO: We've come a long way since I was a kid in South Florida and you could watch "Sabado Gigante" and shows like that. But I bring that up because the inroads you're making with connected television, with Estrella news channel on Pluto TV in Spanish, and Amazon News on Fire TV devices, I mean, you're going to be hitting an ad buy. I think it's something like $25 per 1,000, whereas just if it's on a computer, it's $1 per 1,000. That gives you a head start over a lot of media companies. Where is this headed?

PETER MARKHAM: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, we're seeing even higher than $25 CPMs on connected TV. I think the attraction to the advertisers is that with data, you who you're targeting. So higher CPMs than even general linear television. Certainly much higher than traditional display advertising on the computer.

So we see a huge opportunity from a revenue perspective and being able to identify that Hispanic consumer in language, knowing a lot of data around their other consumption habits. So it's very effective for the advertiser to spend more money, but to reach the exact right audience versus the spillage that happens when they're targeting the general population.

ADAM SHAPIRO: When I looked at the notes of what you're doing as you create content for streaming, are you further ahead than more traditional, I'm just going to say Anglo content creators? Because the world that you can reach is huge. It doesn't, it's not just here in the United States with the content you're creating.

PETER MARKHAM: Yeah, absolutely. Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world. I think there's something around 600 million Spanish speakers. So it is an enormous global content opportunity. So we create almost all of our content here in the US, really targeting initially the US Hispanic marketplace. But since we own that content, we can now distribute it globally to those 600 million consumers around the world. So we think we are way ahead of some of the Anglo providers here in the US.

And especially since we're targeting a very specific audience that is a big and important here in the US, but obviously around the world, it's a much bigger audience. And we think streaming, whether that's ad supported or subscription-based or some combination of, is a really big opportunity.

JULIA LA ROCHE: And Peter, earlier in the conversation, you mentioned, this is a very young demographic. They're building wealth, they're very mobile, you have this incredible amount of data. How do you think about from a content production perspective, curating content for them? What are the things that you're, what are I guess, what does your audience like? What are they interested in now? And how do you think about your content production playbook?

PETER MARKHAM: Yeah, so I think for us, our playbook has been really content for the US has been and created by the US Hispanic. So immigrants who have moved here and established themselves here want to see themselves on TV. And that's very much our content approach. And it's very, very much a younger skewing audience. So thinking about digital natives and people that are using connected TV devices much younger, much more tech savvy. So really hitting that audience segment and creating that content that's relevant here, and it can travel globally.

JULIA LA ROCHE: Well, Peter Markham, Chief Executive of Estrella Media, I thank you so much for joining us today.