Mia Films creates three video portals.

Mia Films, a production company with offices in Miami, Mexico, Argentina and Costa Rica and associated offices in Spain, Portugal and Italy has announced the launch of Vesyves, (Watchandwatch in Spanish: http://watchandwatch.com/intro/) a high-quality video portal targeting the Spanish-speaking Internet users who live in Latin America and Europe.

Mia Films joined forces with PSP in Lisbon and Haibun in Milan to also create a Portuguese and an Italian version of Vesyves called Verever and Vedievedi. “A few weeks ago we met in Lisbon with our European partners to define the global programming strategy and the launching schedule” states Massimo Martinotti, President of Mia Films and Vesyves.

“The opportunities are enormous: The number of broadband subscribers in Latin America, Spain and the US Hispanic Market grew spectacularly in 2006: Mexico, for instance, experienced a growth of 57% from the year 2005, Argentina grew 87% and Spain 38%. It is the right moment to offer this growing audience professional video portals with a television look and feel and featuring exclusively high quality video content. Vesyves will target the more than 80 million Internet users who live in 21 Spanish speaking countries with culturally relevant video content capable of appealing to the different cultures”.

“Verever”, states Patricia Lino, the head of the Portuguese portal, “will offer professionally produced video content to the almost 40 million Portuguese-speaking Internet users based in Brazil, Portugal, Macao (China), Mozambique and Angola.”

“Vedievedi” according to Cesare Fracca, in charge of the Italian portal, “will target the 59 million Italian-speaking people living in Italy and Switzerland. Vedievedi will have some of its content translated into English to target the almost 15.6 million Italian-Americans, the seventh largest ancestry group living in the US. In addition to that, through its sisters channels in Spanish and Portuguese, it will reach the Italians living in Latin America, and especially the 18 million Argentineans and the 25 million Brazilians of Italian origin”.

The three portals will offer a combination of original and aggregated content.

“We have had offices and production centers in several countries for over ten years” adds Martinotti “and this has allowed us to be extremely efficient and cost effective when we produced TV commercials in the US, Latin America and Europe. We are now using this experience and these structures to produce a different kind of original content. We have already shot, for instance, the pilots of 8 different series of webisodes in Mexico, Miami, Costa Rica and Portugal and we expect to be able to produce over 90 minutes of new content very day by the end of 2007. We are actively looking for scriptwriters, directors, designers, musicians to develop new original content and we are interested in working with content producers to aggregate their videos to our portals”.

“Vesyves, Verever and Vedievedi” adds Martinotti, “will be ad-supported, and has the objective of becoming a bridge between the producers of video content and the viewers. The content producers will monetize their production through an ad revenue sharing program and the viewers will be able to watch what they want on the platform of their choice. The portals will also connect the brands with almost 150 million consumers. The creation of a medium capable of connecting the advertisers and Spanish, Portuguese and Italian-speaking consumers is a very promising operation. The project is fully scalable allowing the creation of additional portals applying the same proprietary technology Mia Films has developed. While the Spanish, Portuguese and Italian portals are basically generalists because of the lack of serious competitors in these markets, we are planning on creating extremely specialized portals in English designed to target very specific audiences”, concludes Martinotti.

Vesyves, Verever and Vedievedi will come online in the fall of 2007.