All eyes on Madrid! The Spanish capital and film and TV production hub is bringing together media and entertainment industry folks, including producers, creatives and executives from Europe, Latin America, the U.S. and beyond, to discuss Spanish- and Portuguese-language content opportunities and hot industry topics at the sixth edition of Iberseries & Platino Industria this week.
Organized by the Secuoya Foundation, Spain’s largest rights collection agency EGEDA, and the Ibero-American Federation FIPCA, the big annual event, which runs Tuesday through Friday, will once again feature keynote addresses, panel discussions, screenings, pitching sessions, and social events, along with all sorts of innovations.
AI, microdramas, co-productions, literary adaptations and much more will be in the spotlight during four jam-packed days in Madrid.
Among the many high-profile speakers and panelists at Iberseries are the likes of Katina Medina Mora, who has directed such series as Off Campus, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Emily in Paris and Swagger and such films as LuTo, Luis Fernández, chairman of NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises, and Pedro Pina, vp, YouTube EMEA.
THR caught up with Iberseries & Platino Industria co-directors Samuel Castro, head of Iberseries, Juan Alía, head of Platino Industria, and Adriana Castillo, general coordinator of Platino Industria, to preview the 2026 showcase of the Spanish- and Portuguese-language content industry event and what’s different this year.
What’s new for this year’s edition? Could you highlight any new offerings and innovations?
SAMUEL CASTRO This year, we wanted to reinforce our commitment to the industry and further establish Iberseries & Platino Industria as a truly business- and networking-driven event. With this in mind, we have launched two new pitch sessions: Euro Atlantic Series Co-Pro Pitch, focused on European series projects seeking international co-production and financing partners; and the Fundación SGAE Pitch Session, featuring outstanding projects from Spanish-speaking showrunners.
ADRIANA CASTILLO One of the things we have worked on this year is making Iberseries & Platino Industria useful at different stages of a project’s journey. We do not want it to be simply a place where talent comes together; we want it to be a place where talent finds the conditions to grow: financing, partnerships, distribution and real international opportunities.
That has led us to open new doors this year. We created the Literary Works Pitch for Audiovisual Adaptation, strengthened international co-production through the Euro Atlantic Series Co-Pro Pitch and the Co-Production and Financing Forum, and opened spaces to discuss new ways of telling stories, including vertical fiction and microdramas.
For me, the important thing is that these are not isolated activities. We are trying to connect the dots. A creator can arrive with an idea or an IP and meet producers, financiers, platforms, studios, distributors, or potential partners. Ultimately, what we want is to shorten the distance between a good story and the people who can help bring it to life.
JUAN ALÍA I do not think the novelty lies simply in adding more activities. When an edition ends, we sit down to look at what worked, what we can improve and, above all, what the industry is asking of us. This year, we have opened up more avenues for projects to find financing, partners and buyers, and we have broadened the scope with areas such as literary IP and vertical fiction.
For us, the key is usefulness. We want professionals who come to Madrid for four days to have real opportunities to find the content, project, or partner they are looking for. If those meetings lead to synergies, co-productions or new lines of business, then the event is fulfilling its purpose.
Why did it make sense to add the first edition of Euro Atlantic Series Co-Pro Pitch to your already busy program? And Sony Pictures Television’s Elevator Pitch will also return. How successful was that last year?
CASTRO Euro Atlantic Series Co-Pro Pitch was created with the aim of promoting the co-production and international circulation of European fiction, docuseries and animation projects conceived from the outset to travel across territories and connect with global audiences. It is another reflection of the increasingly international scale of Iberseries & Platino Industria, as we continue evolving from an Ibero-American event into a truly global industry platform.
Samuel Castro, co-director Iberseries & Platino Industria
Courtesy of Iberseries & Platino Industria
The selection committee for this first edition also brings together highly respected professionals from the European audiovisual industry, including Laura Miñarro, vp of international business and co-production at Buendía Estudios (Spain), Diego del Pozo, fiction manager at Atresmedia Televisión (Spain), José Fragoso, programming director at RTP1 and RTP Internacional (Portugal), and Georges Huercano, development and co-productions manager at RTL (Belgium).
Can you tell me a bit about why you added the new literary works adaptation pitch event?
CASTILLO It emerged quite naturally from what we had been hearing from the industry. In our conversations with [streaming] platforms, studios and producers, IP comes up again and again. Executives are looking for attractive properties, of course, but above all they are looking for powerful stories, distinctive worlds and characters capable of sustaining an audiovisual life.
At the same time, there is an enormous catalogue of stories in the publishing world, and there is not always a natural space for the publishing and audiovisual sectors to meet, or even to speak the same business language. We saw a clear opportunity to build a bridge between them.
This is not about bringing a book fair to an audiovisual market. It is a curated business space where publishers and literary agencies can present works directly to producers, studios and platforms looking for material to adapt, and then continue those conversations through one-to-one meetings.
Literary IP also brings something extremely valuable to the audiovisual pipeline: narrative development and, in many cases, a story that has already connected with a community of readers. But our interest goes beyond a one-off rights sale. We want to foster longer-term relationships between publishers and producers, help those catalogues circulate internationally and identify stories that can genuinely find a second life on screen.
In that sense, the pitch [event] also reflects something we are seeing across the industry: the search for IP has become much more strategic. It is no longer simply a question of whether a book is well known; it is about whether there is a powerful story there and what can be built from it.
ALÍA In this case, we are not inventing a need; it is something the market has been signalling to us for some time. Platforms and production companies are increasingly looking for IP, while publishers and literary agencies have enormous catalogues of stories. What was missing was a more direct and structured meeting point between the two sectors.
If a publisher or agency leaves Madrid having started a real conversation with a production company, studio or platform, then the pitch has already been useful.
Everybody is talking about AI in the industry. How important a topic will that be at Iberseries? And what other key themes do you expect to be in focus at this year’s edition?
CASTRO AI will have the prominence it deserves, but always from the perspective of understanding it as a regulated tool at the service of creators, technicians and audiovisual production professionals.
Among this year’s activities focused on AI, I would particularly highlight the workshop “Artificial Intelligence for Creators: Enhancing Audiovisual Storytelling,” led by Concepción Díaz, head of AI trainings EMEA at Google, and the conference “AI in Action: New Production Models,” featuring Erik Barmack, founder & CEO of Wild Sheep Content (USA), and Johann Choron, partnerships & Gen AI lead for film & TV at Google EMEA (France).
How is attendance trending this year compared to what I think was a record last year?
CASTRO It is still difficult to give a definitive answer. The industry as a whole is going through a period of some contraction, and companies seem to be taking a more cautious approach. Against this backdrop, we have deliberately chosen to offer a more disruptive and ambitious program this year. I hope that this will encourage even more industry players to join us.
Are there any key new companies or industry sub-sectors coming to the event this year?
CASTILLO Yes, and I think what is particularly interesting this year is not only the arrival of new companies, but also the way different areas of the industry are beginning to connect within Iberseries & Platino Industria.
We are also seeing very interesting models emerging from the meeting point between traditional audiovisual players and digital communities. Disney+ and Luzu TV are a great example. ‘Somos así, la serie de Nadie dice nada’ comes out of an alliance between one of the leading streaming platforms and one of Argentina’s most influential digital communities. A live-streaming phenomenon is being transformed into fiction, and that raises a very interesting question for the industry: how do you take a community with such a strong relationship with its creators and build a fictional universe around it without losing the authenticity that made it successful in the first place?
Adriana Castillo, general coordinator of Platino Industria
Courtesy of Iberseries & Platino Industria
Then there is the increasingly important role of audience intelligence. JustWatch adds another dimension to that conversation with its session on intent-based marketing: how behavioural signals and audience preferences can help us understand not only what people have watched, but what they are looking to watch next, and how that information can be used to make more efficient marketing decisions.
Netflix, for example, is participating through different parts of the programme. One of them addresses an increasingly important challenge for the audiovisual industry: how we train the next generation of professionals, how we reduce access gaps in training and how we build a more diverse, equitable talent base with broader territorial reach across Ibero-America.
A panel featuring FORMA, the training initiative promoted by FIPCA [, an intercontinental organization that brings together producer associations and audiovisual companies,] with the support of Netflix, is a good example of the kind of collaboration we want to encourage more and more at Iberseries & Platino Industria: initiatives that not only respond to the needs of today’s productions, but also strengthen the industry over the long term.
The platform is also involved in content presentations, so its presence connects training, industry development and programming.
ALÍA I think what matters is that we are trying to open the scope as widely as possible. Netflix, Disney+, Luzu TV and JustWatch are very different players, but each represents a very specific change taking place in the sector: training and professionalisation, the transition from digital communities to fiction, and the growing importance of audience data in marketing and decision-making.
CASTRO One of our main [goals] this year has been to give the event an even stronger European dimension. We have attracted major companies such as Banijay, Mediawan, Beta, ARTE and RAI, to name just a few. But perhaps even more significant is the growing number of European production companies interested in co-producing with Spain. This is reflected in the participation of leading professionals such as Iris Bucher, Femke Wolting from Submarine and Nathalie Perus from Atlantique Productions, among others.
It is not about adding companies simply for the sake of adding logos. We want the event to be the opportunity the producer or executive has been looking for.
Which Spanish- and Portuguese-language or -produced films and series have highlighted the global appeal of Iberian content?
CASTILLO There are some very clear examples. El Eternauta (series The Eternaut) from Argentina and O Agente Secreto (film The Secret Agent) from Brazil have shown, in very different ways, how stories deeply rooted in a specific place and culture can have an international life and reach new audiences.
And I think that is very important: global does not have to mean neutral. Very often, the specificity of a story – its language, its characters, its social context, even its sense of place – is precisely what makes it interesting to other audiences.
This year, we will present Véspera, HBO Max’s new Brazilian original series based on Carla Madeira’s bestselling novel. It is a complex family story, deeply Brazilian in origin, but built around emotions, relationships and moral conflicts that are entirely universal.
For me, Véspera also connects with another conversation we are having this year: the strength of literary IP. It shows how a successful Portuguese-language novel can move into another medium and potentially reach a completely new audience. That circulation between books and screens, between local identity and international audiences, and between Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking territories, is exactly the kind of movement we want to promote through Iberseries & Platino Industria.
ALÍA I think Spanish- and Portuguese-language content no longer has to prove that it can travel. Titles such as El Eternauta and O Agente Secreto make that quite clear: they emerge from very specific cultural realities and yet work internationally.
Juan Alía, co-director of Iberseries & Platino Industria
Courtesy of Iberseries & Platino Industria
That is also why we believe it is important to present titles such as Véspera at Iberseries & Platino Industria. A market should not only look at what has already worked; it should also help upcoming projects find partners, circulate and reach new audiences.
CASTRO Portugal is particularly important to us this year. We have worked closely with APIT and the Portugal Film Commission to bring a delegation of Portuguese producers to the event, including Nicky Correia from SIC, Bruno Lima from Coral Europa, Pandora da Cunha Telles from Ukbar Filmes and Piet-Hein Bakker from Plural Entertainment, among others. Their participation reflects both the strength of Portuguese production and our commitment to strengthening connections between the Portuguese, Spanish and wider international audiovisual industries.
Is there anything else you would like to highlight?
ALÍA Ultimately, what matters to us is that all of this is useful. The number of accredited professionals is important, of course, as is the event’s international character, but the real assessment does not end on 2 October.
What will truly make us happy is to look back in two or three years and see that projects presented here in a pitch, a forum or a meeting have become reality, have reached a cinema, a television channel or a platform and, above all, have reached audiences. If Iberseries & Platino Industria has contributed to that, then we will feel that we have done our job well.
CASTILLO I would certainly highlight Mexico, which is our Country in Focus this year. We were very clear that the objective was to put forward a specific industry proposition.
For several years, the conversation around Mexico has focused on its talent, the size of its market and its production scale. These are already recognised strengths. This year, we want to take the conversation one step further and ask another question: why produce in Mexico today? There are new conditions that make this conversation particularly relevant: incentives, such as [the Tax Incentive for Film and Audiovisual Production] EFICA, production infrastructure, specialised technical services, post-production, film commissions and, of course, a production community with enormous experience in both Mexican and international projects.
That is why there will be a series of activities designed to position Mexico from different angles: its creators and stories, of course, but also its production capacity, its services and its potential to become a partner on international projects.
I think that is the message we want to leave: Mexico has always had stories and talent. What is particularly interesting today is the combination of that creative strength with increasingly competitive conditions for making films and series in the country.
CASTRO There are two highlights I would particularly mention this year. The first is Pedro Pina’s keynote, “YouTube: A Strategic Partner for the Audiovisual Ecosystem,” which will explore YouTube’s increasingly important role within the audiovisual industry.
The second is the Mediawan Spotlight, featuring Elisabeth d’Arvieu, CEO of Mediawan Pictures and chief content officer of Mediawan, which I believe will be another major moment in this year’s program.
