Intuitive, innovative, businessman with an icy look and youthful appearance, Tomas Escobar He became a symbol of precocity, a self-made man who could achieve whatever he set his mind to while sitting in front of a computer.
With primary school in Brazil, secondary school in San Juan and university life in Córdoba, Escobar turned out to be a creative and efficient entrepreneur. At 14, he had his website for “Harry Potter” fans. At the age of 22 he founded Cavea site that had 15 million followers, a fundamental stop for consumers willing to watch series and movies for free.
Now Escobar is 37 years old and is betting big again. Receive NOTICIAS at the legendary production company of Armando Bó, one of his partners along with Ariel Arrieta in Shortathe first platform for original series in vertical format in Latin America.
In a house office located meters from the River court, Escobar proposes the talk, with the enthusiasm typical of beginnings full of promises ready to become reality.
News: What is Shorta and what is its distinctive feature?
Tomas Escobar: Shorta is a new application to watch series designed exclusively for cell phones, for the pace at which we currently consume content. Vertical format, two-minute episodes, today people are very used to consuming video clips, a lot of TikTok and Instagram, but there was no fiction in this format, Shorta comes to propose that. You can watch any series with advertising for free or subscribe if you want to avoid ads, just like on YouTube, we try to make it very accessible so that it can reach a massive audience. It is already up and running with the first original series and we have new premieres every week.
News: It is surprising that one of your partners is Armando Bó, because we are talking about a format very different from cinema. What’s more, it could contribute to the public watching less and less cinema…
Escobar: I think it’s the other way around, for me Shorta is an opportunity for people to see more fiction and I think that there we share a lot of the spirit and mission with Armando. We want to make more fiction and for talent to be able to produce, act, and tell more stories. We are committed to making culturally relevant fiction, with local artists and talents, because although things are being done, they are few. TV produces very little local fiction, the catalog of Netflix and other platforms is much more international, national productions are sporadic. At Shorta we have more than forty series underway, this year we are going to premiere more than a hundred with Argentine talent, it is a very interesting and innovative proposal.
News: Where are you in the business, in subscriptions?
Escobar: We saw an opportunity that was born in China, it is a new audiovisual format complementary to the existing ones, which is growing within the digital audience, a massive audience of billions who today consume these short videos all day long. There we see a window for new talents, new production companies, people from the world of cinema, television and networks to have an innovative voice within a much more efficient production format. In other words, it is cheaper to make short series and that means we can give opportunities to many people who otherwise would not be making fiction today. Like Shorta, we monetize and distribute, on the one hand, we have advertising and a subscription model. We take care of that and we also collaborate with the profits from each series, sharing them with everyone involved in generating the content. It is a challenge to produce fiction in a 100% private environment, without tax incentives, but we believe it can be viable and we are betting that the industry will grow.
News: Are you optimistic that these vertical series can contribute to the growth and expansion of the audiovisual industry?
Escobar: Without a doubt, I think there stopped being fiction and a lot of user-generated content began to become popular. This is a way to begin to redefine fiction in this new format and use it as a vehicle to expand it, because people were already consuming more videos and content generated by users than traditional productions. One of our series has, on average, 40 chapters of between one and a half and two minutes, all added together equivalent to a short film. Definitely the idea is to complement the formats that we all already know and take a greater creative risk.
News: What does this creative risk consist of?
Escobar: Fiction has always required a very high investment with a risky return, which is why many productions are never even made or take many years to see the light of day. I believe that the vertical and segmented format enables greater creative risk because it will generate new ideas. It also eliminates a bit of bureaucracy, makes available to the viewer what will end up working, opens up that game and can scale to other windows or formats.
News: Do you feel that it is a good opportunity for figures that are starting out?
Escobar: Totally, we are discovering a lot of young talent, it is incredible how well prepared they are and the things they can do. Talking to kids between 10 and 15 years old, if you ask them what they want to be when they grow up, the majority will say YouTuber or content creator. It is a global phenomenon, but I think that particularly in Argentina we have a strong tendency to create audiovisual content, we are a country with a great cultural identity and it is up to us to tell stories, the challenge is to be able to make it viable and reach massive audiences. Shorta is aimed at the public that likes to watch content on their cell phone. We understand that today there is a clear trend where young people prefer that because they were born with the rhythm of social networks, but our idea is to build on that base and reach viewers of different generations.
News: Did you approach this idea to Armando Bó to generate the project?
Escobar: There was a synergy, I traveled to China with Shorta’s other partner, Ariel Arrieta, and a group of entrepreneurs. There we were surprised by the vertical series industry that they developed, it is the new Hollywood of the Chinese. When I sized it up, I realized that obviously this is going to be a very big phenomenon, because we all spend many hours a day on our cell phones and being able to do something different, with a different quality, seemed like a spectacular opportunity to us. So when we returned we went to see Armando and we quickly agreed that it was an opportunity to reach the audience that today cinema is having a hard time conquering. We saw it as a way to build bridges between audiovisual and new generations. I started with Cuevana at 19 living in Córdoba, since I was a child I have been passionate about the subject, at that time my greatest interest was not movies but series, but audiovisuals touch a chord with me and now with Shorta I am confirming it.
News: It seems that you thought about fiction since you were a child because you had a site dedicated to Harry Potter, right?
Escobar: Yes, I was 14 years old and that place was the door to start getting into the world of technology, there I started programming. I realized from a young age that what I was interested in was creating and I found the Internet as the vehicle to do so and reach a lot of people from different countries from my home. That flashed me, I became aware of how incredible it was to be in San Juan and have my content seen by someone on the other side of the map, that gave me the push to think about things that were truly global. In fact, this is how Shorta was also born, from Argentina, but with an expansive vision, we are already doing pre-productions in Mexico and Spain with the idea of continuing to scale to Brazil and the United States.
News: In Argentina, did Cuevana end due to the arrival of Netflix?
Escobar: Look, Cuevana was the product of a combination of things. Firstly, Cuevana was born as a hobby product and would never have been on the scale it took. When it started to grow, my idea was always to get closer to the industry and try to find a way to transition from DVD distribution to the world of streaming through Cuevana. I met with the majors to find a viable way to license the rights, put together a business model that would be attractive to everyone and I couldn’t do it. The road was very difficult, there were many interests in the middle. I ended up closing Cuevana a bit because I didn’t see clearly how I could channel that change together with the industry and I didn’t want to continue any other way. I think Netflix capitalized on it very well because there was already an audience throughout Latin America with more than 15 million users accustomed to consuming online. That is precisely why Netflix decided that its first market to land after the United States was Latin America. Today I think I found the formula to integrate into the industry with my own style, without conforming to the norms, proposing something innovative is in my essence.
