A New Entertainment Destination for Latinos

Mio.tv founders Manuel Garcia-Duran and Moses Frenck think the time is right for a bilingual Web-based entertainment network

by Nick Leiber

Do the 44.3 million Latinos in the U.S. want a new one-stop Web site where they can watch TV and make phone calls, among other entertainment options, for free?

Manuel Garcia-Duran and Moses Frenck are confident many do. Garcia-Duran, the former chairman of Spanish telecom giant Telefónica's (TEF) Telefónica Media, and Frenck, the former managing editor of Adweek's Marketing y Medios magazine, started New York-based Mio.tv to create an interactive entertainment network that targets bilingual and acculturated Latinos. Mio will offer video programming, gaming, a VoIP-based voice and video phone, and a suite of office tools packaged within a snazzy media player with functions and aesthetics that feel like something Apple (AAPL) could have cooked up. The 10-person company plans to produce about 80% of its programming content and license the rest through exclusive agreements.

Mio, which means "mine" in Spanish, will launch its beta version of the network and platform on Nov. 21, when a small group of investors, advertisers, partners, and technology developers will be invited to use the proprietary media player and watch a dozen or so of Mio's original TV shows. Those include Kiki Melendez's Kiki Desde Hollywood (Melendez is a popular entertainer among Latinos), a movie review show called Rodriguez & Ebert modeled after Ebert & Roeper, and Café con Ana Maria Montero (Montero is an anchor and correspondent for CNN en Español). Mio plans to open to the public by early March.

Billions in Buying Power

Mio's business model acknowledges what many advertisers already know: No one really clicks on banner ads (BusinessWeek, 11/12/07), and so is moving from a market being measured by page views to one measured by time spent online. So Mio will sell advertising at what Frenck calls "competitive" rates based on the time-spent metric (BusinessWeek.com, 7/11/07) recently adopted by measurement firms such as Nielsen//NetRatings.

By creating a place where users want to spend extended periods of time, watching a soccer game or calling a relative living abroad, for example, Mio hopes to give advertisers a better way to reach the Latino market—whose buying power was estimated at $798 billion last year and is expected to surpass $1 trillion by 2011.

"Companies like AOL, MSN (MSFT), and Yahoo! (YHOO) recognized the importance of Latinos. But their sites are subsidiaries of their flagship properties. Mio is fundamentally created for the Latino community and is reaching out to Spanish-language as well as bilingual Latinos," says Frenck, a native of Peru. Adds Garcia-Duran: "We're an independent company focusing on Latinos because we are Latinos. We want to better serve our community."

Not Just a Label

Industry watchers say it won't be easy. Felipe Korzenny, professor and director of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at Florida State University, says marketing to Latinos is complicated because Latinos have proved, in the past 15 years, that they want the best content available, not something that's simply labeled "Latino." "You don't want to go to a place your friends think is corny; you want a place that is both culturally relevant and appeals to your friends who aren't Hispanic," Korzenny says.