Meadowlark Media, co-founded by former ESPN President John Skipper, and Ocellated Media are expected to announce a strategic partnership later today. Their plan is to create Spanish-language audio and unscripted video programming for Latino sports fans living in the U.S.
According to Skipper, “the content available does not mirror the proportion of the population,” which fuels the interest in non-English programming. Very little sports programming is delivered in a language other than English, although Latinos make up around 19% of the total population. Understandably, that community would like to hear the programming in its native language.
Meadowlark and Ocellated recently decided to work alongside Skydance Sports to produce Good Neighbors, a documentary about the rivalry between the U.S. men’s national soccer team and the Mexican national team.
The documentary will include current and former members of both teams with each player interviewed in his first language. It will not be told from a specific team’s point of view.
“We want it to play in both Columbus, Ohio and Mexico City,” Skipper said.
By keeping the documentary unbiased, playing it in multiple countries, and capitalizing on soccer’s standing as the world’s most popular sport, the companies have set themselves up for a high value project.
Besides the Good Neighbors documentary, viewers can expect most of the collaborations going forward to be in Spanish. The plan is to oblige the underserved audience by providing a product for one of the fastest growing demographics in the U.S. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the Hispanic population grew 23% between 2010 and 2020.
Up to this point, Telemundo and Univision have been the go-to networks for Spanish-speaking programming and the bulk of sports-related content for the demo. But Meadowlark and Ocellated aren’t trying to compete with them. They actually see those networks as potential buyers.
Based in Mexico City, Ocellated brings a level of market expertise, authenticity, and in-house production capabilities to the partnership.
“Production services in Mexico are quite efficient and significantly less expensive,” said Skipper, “so on selective projects we’ll take advantage of that.”
Along with today’s announcement, Meadowlark and Ocellated will also introduce a new daily Spanish-language sports, entertainment, current events and sports betting podcast, to be hosted by Jorge “El Burro” Van Rankin. The plan is for the podcast to complement Meadowlark co-founder Dan Le Batard’s daily show.
“We will not have to build [the audience] from scratch,” Skipper said. “We can use Dan’s show to help launch [the “El Burro” show] and [to] get it an audience. And over time we think we can develop a fairly significant audience.”
If everything goes well, Skipper expects the two companies to replicate the model and “build [out] some other Spanish-language podcasts around the world.”
