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Any production or distribution company in Latin America that manages to get its content into China usually makes headlines. And there is a reason for that: China is nothing but the largest market in the world and any local audience looks meager when compared to the potential hundreds of millions of viewers that the Asian country has to offer.

Yet none of this is new for Larry Namer. The executive is the president of Metan Development Group, a company that works as a bridge between Beijin and Los Angeles and focuses on “bringing things into China and taking things from China,” he said.

A MATTER OF ADAPTING
“In China we create shows for all broadcast platforms, from national to regional, including terrestrial and satellite,” Namer told ttv. Metan is particularly focused on purchasing formats that are suitable to be rewritten and reproduced for the Chinese market, “even after all the changes that we need to make in order to adapt the content to the country’s culture and regulations,” he said.

When asked what type of content works the best for China, Namer shows he knows the market well. “Romantic comedy is very big right now because it can be translated and understood by a Chinese audience,” he said. And what about telenovelas, then? Even though many have been adapted, the truth is that telenovelas are not always the best genre. “It gets a little tricky. A lot of the culture and customs in China are different so you can’t really have much sex, you can’t really have much violence,” the executive said. “We have looked at a bunch but we haven’t found any that we think are exactly adaptable or where the company that owns the rights was willing to make the changes that would be necessary to make it culturally acceptable.”

And that is why not everything that is popular in the Western world can work across the Pacific ocean. “We don’t think, for example, that new crime dramas can work there but there are actually older crime dramas done in the 80s that didn’t really have the same level of violence,” Namer said. “They were actually kind of sweeter and more innocent; crimes were mostly solved by thinking rather than fighting. Those kinds of formats could work in China.”

A HYPER-CONNECTED AUDIENCE
“The future for multi-platform in China is greater than anywhere else,” Namer said in regard to new technologies and their potential for TV. According to the executive, there are now over 425 million people in China who watch videos from broadband, which poses a more than interesting setting for the famous 360 approaches. “When we look at stuff, we look at its multi-platform capabilities, so it has to be online and mobile capable,” he concluded.