Amanda Ospina, executive director of ONLY TELENOVELAS, Fiction & Formats

Telenovelas and fiction formats. Their best or worst moment?

The Telenovela and Fiction Industry is going through one of its best moments, since there has never been such a great and varied production and in so many different territories all over the world.
But despite all the passion and demand these contents generate in the audiences and how profitable they are for programmers, there are fissures to be fixed within the industry.
The process of globalization has brought about deep changes in production schemes, marketing and presentations to the ultimate consumer.
There is economic concentration, media depersonalization and the interest in entering such an appealing business on the part of both the independent producer working from his home garage and the great multinational companies. All these are precisely the factors that, now more than ever, lead to the production of creative and joint work that promotes, strengthens and values the members and the near future of this industry, and also the creators of melodrama and fiction –specially telenovelas and fiction formats.
The political and social prospects affecting us influence the morning, afternoon and evening telenovelas. We are being pushed more and more towards fragmentation, and this occurs not only because we urgently need to find niches and different means of distribution but because these products must not stop being attractive to the advertisers, since they are still their greater financial support.
For all this, we are approaching to the Third World Summit of the Telenovela and Fiction Formats Industry taking place in Madrid, where the people involved in this business not only redefine concepts and products, but also exchange experiences, opening a wide range of opportunities to those who turn a deaf ear to the great consuming audience in all continents.
The commitment on the part of our telenovelas creators will continue to consist in capturing the dreams and fantasies. But, which is the utopia in this times of decentralization and globalization; in this era of technology and constant changes? In order to create new utopias it is essential to create this sort of spaces, where reflection and research go beyond routines and repetitions of schemes.
As telenovelas are products that do not run out and neither did their laws or their aesthetics, the directors within this industry congregated in 2003 in Miami, in 2004 in Barcelona and this year they will do it with greater power in Madrid.
As now more than ever fissures are of the economic type but not creative, this business leaders will meet behind closed doors for two days to deeply reflect and discuss with higher conviction so numerous and vertiginous changes.
We are then in the most crucial and appropriate moment for the evolution of telenovelas, since for a long time now the melodrama and fiction business has not contemplated each country’s domestic consumption, because it has been forced to be a more global business, winning the biggest audiences. Due all the preceding factors, all of us –Latin Americans, Americans, Europeans, Asians, and Africans– are faced today to a powerful business that has possibilities to explore and exploit, that is enormously popular and has long life. Thank you and we meet in October when all continents will get together again in Madrid.