How the pandemic impacted TV viewing among Hispanics was a topic that Romina Rosado, the senior VP of entertainment and content for NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises, addressed during her keynote interview conducted by R. Thomas Umstead of Multichannel News Thursday (Sept. 24) at the 18th annual Hispanic Television Summit.
Rosado, who moved to Telemundo in Miami from E! News in Los Angeles two years ago "to really drive the Hispanic strategy forward," as she said, pointed out the impact of COVID-19 has meant that everyone in a household was at home at the same time, and they had more available time to watch TV together. “We saw an increase in family co-viewing,” said Rosado, who sees the changing appetite among Hispanic audience segments to be shifting toward a desire to watch more fun and family-oriented content. She continued, “Viewers sought out programming that was not too violent. We discovered they were drawn to our popular competition weeknight program, Exactlon.”
The pandemic also impacted the schedule. Production was shut down in some of the countries where Telemundo’s content is produced. For example, the new reality competition series El Domo del Dinero was expected to launch months ago but production was stopped to adjust for social distancing. The program will now launch in the coming weeks. Similarly, the Billboard Latin Music Awards, usually presented in April, were moved to October.
One of her goals, she said, is to achieve “diversity in the team, and diversity on the screen.” She continued, “Representing the diversity within the Hispanic community is critical. We have already achieved a 50%-plus gender balance in favor of women.” She also spoke about Telemundo’s focus on news coverage of the November election as well as the network’s community efforts to drive voter registration among Latino youth and encouraging viewers to complete the census.
Rosado’s interview was on Day 4 of this year’s virtual presentation of the Hispanic Television Summit. The summit was presented by Future plc's Media Entertainment Group Broadcasting+Cable, Multichannel News and Next TV and produced by Schramm Marketing Group. The summit was presented over four days, Sept. 21-24, with daily 90-minute segments. All sessions are available on demand. Simply register for the Hispanic Television Summit, free of charge as a single track of the Fall TV 2020 events series, which continues with the Streaming TV Summit and Audience Measurement Summit. More at www.falltvevents.com.
