Webnovela: A Soap Opera for Mobile Phones, Tablets EFE
go to original October 26, 2012

Mexico's TV network Televisa and US Spanish-language broadcaster Univision Thursday unveiled a new soap opera especially written and filmed for mobile phone and tablet computer screens.

"We wanted to start producing things that were specifically for these new technologies and new screens," Emilio Aliaga, deputy director of digital and new media for Televisa told EFE.

Televisa has previously placed a lot of content on the web and produced special web content associated with a specific product, but "we'd never made an entire soap opera, which is one of our main products", for internet users, he said.

The "webnovela" is titled "Te presento a Valentin" (Meet Valentin) and will premiere Monday on the web sites of both television networks, although the first episode was already broadcast during Thursday's presentation.

Each of the 15 episodes will last around seven minutes and will be uploaded to the web Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, although users may later view them at any time.

"Te presento a Valentin" was entirely produced for the web and written to fit into that brief running time, Aliaga said.

"It's specifically written for the web so that the plot hooks ... occur every five minutes, while in a (typical) soap opera the plot hooks happen every 45 minutes or at each commercial break," he said.

Televisa announced in late 2010 the completion of a previously announced $1.2 billion investment in Univision. The deal also included a broadening and extension of the program license agreement between the two broadcasters.

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