Netflix Agrees With Atresmedia Preferential Access to Spanish TV Dramas

By Emiliano De Pablos

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – MADRID  — In a deal that further strengthens an already-close relationship, Netflix and Spain’s Atresmedia have agreed to give the streaming TV giant preferential access to TV dramas from Series , the Spanish broadcaster’s TV fiction brand.

The pact endows with a priority choice over an undisclosed number of Series Atresmedia’s titles to show them exclusively as part of Netflix international offer.

Upcoming Atresmedia TV series to launch via Netflix for the global market encompass high-end hit TV dramas such as “Fariña,” the Galicia-set narco thriller co-produced with Bambú and Beta Film, and “La Catedral del Mar,” a co-production with Diagonal TV which Netflix co-financed and boarded early in development.

This new alliance will help Atresmedia to optimize the economic life of its TV dramas, expanding their internationalization strategy, the Spanish broadcaster said in a statement.

Both companies unveiled in April a licensing accord that allowed Netflix and Madrid-based Vancouver Media to produce a third part of “La Casa de Papel,” whose first two parts were originally co-produced and aired by Atresmedia and went on, once hitting Netflix, to become its most-watched non-English-language drama in Netflix history.

As ratings from free-to-air broadcasters around the globe are declining, Atresmedia is increasingly producing series with a cable edge, which may not score huge primetime audiences but can be easily licensed to international SVOD players.

Titles from the Atresmedia Series brand currently available on Netflix worldwide include “Velvet,” “Gran Hotel,” “ La Casa de Papel ,” “Mar de Plástico,” “Vis a Vis,” “El Barco” and “El Internado.”

In early July, Atresmedia announced it will cut the running time of all its new series from 70 to 50 minutes per episode to make them more attractive to international TV services.

Confirming its growing connection with Spanish TV drama, Netflix inked this month a global exclusive overall deal with “La Casa de Papel” creator Álex Pina, the co-founder of Vancouver Media.