Hispanic Web-Users Demand More Videos in Spanish

MIAMI (By Mike Shields, Mediaweek) May 25, 2009 — The enormous growth in Hispanic Internet users in the United States is running up against the problem of the scarcity of video and other content directed at that community.

Hispanic Web-surfers in the United States total some 20 million, of whom about 64 percent access sites such as YouTube, MySpace Video, Crackle or Break.

However, only a few of those – and other similar – Web sites offer content directed specifically and in Spanish to the enormous Hispanic Internet market.

Users and buyers have expressed their disappointment with the online video server Hulu.com, which lost the chance to provide television series and films in Spanish to Hispanic users.

Perhaps one of the elements in the equation is that Internet content providers are having difficulty targeting their products and getting them before the eyes of the highly diverse online Hispanic market, with its huge differences in generational preferences, as well as the fact part of that audience already views videos in English anyway, Mediaweek says.

“There is no sort of obvious behavior that makes U.S. Hispanics different,” Alex Banks, managing director of comScore Latin America, told Shields. “And the U.S. Hispanic audience is unique in they don’t need to consume content in Spanish.”

In any case, the Internet market is sending forth new signals and, according to sources close to Hulu, it seems the free Web portal is presently in conversations with different Spanish-language video producers.

By the same token, the video Web site YouTube is going even farther than Hulu and is contemplating alliances with TV Azteca, Venevision Internacional, Spanish Broadcasting System and Sorpresa TV, among others.

Among the main competitors in getting a piece of the Hispanic video market pie may be Univision.com, despite the fact the TV network is involved in a long-standing dispute with Mexico’s Televisa, the world’s biggest Spanish-language media conglomerate, regarding digital rights.