Carlos Fernández: "Netflix wants to be a free television, but for payment"

In its more than three decades of life, Antena 3 had not been crowned the most watched channel in any season.

Until the course that just ended.

With a 14% screen share, it has sealed the best mark in 13 years.

It has prevailed in the increasingly bloody battle for the audience and has avoided the push of the kings of

Much of the success is based on what the private network has baptized "the golden mile": the trident formed by

and

titles that dominate their respective time slots and have forged a winning block.

“Being leaders has never been our goal,” confesses Carlos Fernández (Madrid, 60 years old), General Director of Content at Atresmedia, who also owns brands such as La Sexta and Onda Cero.

“Our goal”, he underlines, “has always been to have a television model based on entertainment, fiction and current affairs”.

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Fernández knows the audiovisual sector well.

A sociologist by training, he entered the world of audiovisuals in the early 1990s.

He went through Telemadrid, Telecinco, Sogecable, TVE, Plural Entertainment and Vocento until in 2009 he assumed the Contents direction of Atresmedia TV.

He is now the head of the television business after the recent appointment of Javier Bardají as CEO.

In an office whose only note of color is the mosaic of screens in which a dozen channels twinkle, he defends the commitment to Turkish series and maintains that fiction has reached its peak in the global market.

“It is impossible to feed Netflix, Disney, HBO, free-to-air television and the thousands of channels in the world.

Talent is limited."

the weight of fiction

His predictions are usually spot on.

Already in 2015 he announced that a change of cycle was coming.

"Many did not believe me, but we saw that we had to abandon fiction and open up to a much more solid and powerful entertainment model," she recalls.

In fact, the formats intended to distract are the great asset of Antena 3.

It has been broadcast for ten years now and has been exported to 38 countries.

What is symptomatic is that these contents are no longer just the heritage of conventional television.

“When the emergence of payment platforms takes place, which put the focus on fiction, entertainment takes over on linear television.

It is what makes the difference.

Now, the platforms have signed up for entertainment.

If they enter genres that are free-to-air television territory, we will have to move," warns Fernández, who envisions a return to free-to-air broadcasting of more conceptual series.

“If video distributors make melodramas, such as adaptations of Turkish fiction, it will open up opportunities for us to go back to the old world.

Now 80% is entertainment and maybe we have to go to 60% and give more weight to fiction.

Roberto Leal, host of 'Pasapalabra', one of the keys to the chain's success.

The turning point to win the season was not, according to Fernández, the incorporation of

(previously on Telecinco) to the Antena 3 grid, which has garnered 22.5% of the audience, which translates into 2.5 million viewers.

The contest “is important, but not so much to build leadership.

It has helped, although it has not been decisive.

“The Golden Mile” is key to winning prime time, but we started winning the whole day when

It is the axis of victory.”

It catches a million and a half viewers in the desktop (16.3%) and improves the performance of the veteran

(12.3%).

The group has been a pioneer in betting on serials of Turkish origin, which in the international business have taken over from the great Venezuelan soap operas of the 1990s, but with a modernized style, an "impressive level of production."

The director of Atresmedia perceives that the viewer demands to return "to the classic melodrama".

Titles like

or

are a reflection of this new trend, which has even been embraced by payment platforms.

"Netflix already has Turkish series and is working on adaptations for the global market," says Fernández.

Despite everything, he observes that there is a certain stagnation in terms of the fiction offer on the platforms.

“On the one hand, Netflix has begun to cancel projects and, on the other, from a creative point of view, its objective is to find common minimums to attract everyone and that makes the series lose originality.

To this is added that the global audiovisual industry is not enough.

It is not that fiction has collapsed, but it has peaked.

Hence the bet of the platforms for entertainment programs and the bid in the sports rights market: Disney has taken over formula one for the US and Amazon has bought the images of the Premier”.

Image from the Turkish series 'Bitter Land'.

Going to the Turkish market is compatible with own production.

Currently, Atresmedia has 18 series in the process of recording, but many are not intended for broadcast on the general channel but rather on its payment platform, Atresplayer Premium, which this year will premiere

,

and

, among other titles.

News and social networks

The news is another of the fundamental legs of free television.

And in this field, Antena 3 also prevails over its rivals.

Newscasts account for 19.5% of the audience share, compared to 13.5% for Telecinco, 10.5% for TVE and 8.5% for La Sexta.

The two generalist channels of the group act autonomously.

“Antena 3 and La Sexta have their own editorial line and there is no kind of interference.

There is competition in a good way, with two roles clearly distributed.

La Sexta is the channel for current affairs and Antena 3 for entertainment, but without neglecting the news”.

The recurring challenge is how to attract a young audience.

The Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford have detected that 39% of those between 18 and 24 years old use social networks as their main source of news.

Fernández calls this phenomenon "terrifying" because "in social networks, what young people call information probably has nothing to do with journalism because they are stories that are not verified or supported by professional work."

And he believes that if traditional media want to get closer to social networks, they will have to adapt to the narratives of TikTok, Instagram or Twitch.

“The challenge is not to get into a toxic environment that engulfs you.

If solvent media enter, like us or EL PAÍS, we will have an opportunity.

We must learn the language of the young,

their way of communicating and putting themselves in their place, not trying to get them to come to yours.

It is not about reducing a half-hour newscast to five minutes”.

The reform of the audiovisual law has placed the large operators in the trigger on account of the figure of the independent producer.

Fernández rejects the controversy: “Before we had the obligation to invest 0.9% of the billing in independent production companies.

Now we will have to go up to 3.5%.

And the OTTs also enter into that obligation.

We have calculated that the sector will go from an investment of 32 million to 112. If we look at the old American model, in which the producer assumed risk, we see that here a producer brings an idea and does not take risks.

The only risk for him is to lose his industrial benefit”.

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