Love, Murder and Royalty: What Makes LatAm Content Travel

What do a Colombian reggaeton drama, an Argentine kids' telenovela and a Peruvian cartoon baby have in common? They have all racked up hundreds of millions of viewing hours far from home. At MIPCOM 2025, PlumResearch Research Director Jonathan Broughton took the stage in Cannes to explain why, and what the rest of the industry can steal from them.

The world has fallen hard for Spanish-language TV, the US can't get enough of LatAm content, and the shows that travel furthest follow a surprisingly consistent recipe, which is rarely just a love story.

Spanish fever

Across Netflix's top 40 markets, hours watched of Spanish-language content have jumped 78% since 2018, from around 800 million to almost 1.4 billion. That's not a niche. Spanish-language TV has gone from "international section" to front-row regular, and it is one of the clearest winners of streaming's global turn.

America's LatAm habit

The US is a good litmus test of mainstream adoption. PlumResearch compared US viewing hours for content from each LatAm country in 2018 with the last 12 months. The heavyweights are still Colombia and Mexico, but the growth story is much wider.

Peru and Argentina have each grown more than sevenfold. And there's a changing of the guard at the top: Colombia has overtaken Mexico as the biggest source of LatAm viewing in the US, while Mexico, starting from the highest base, grew the slowest of the six.

The gold rush is over. Now it's about sustaining momentum.

Across the 83 markets PlumResearch tracks consumption of LatAm content grew every year from 2017 to 2022, nearly tripling along the way. Lockdown gave it a boost, with hours up 45% in 2020 alone.

However, this levelled out. Viewing slipped about 4% in 2023 and 2% in 2024. Not a crash, but a plateau of the segment as a whole; from here, growth belongs to the shows that genuinely break out.

Meet the breakout stars

So who's breaking out? Every major producing country has at least one title punching way above its weight:

On paper it's a strange line-up: a reggaeton revenge drama, a crime saga, an orphanage musical, a tangled love triangle, a cartoon baby and a heist caper. But dig into what these shows are actually about and a pattern appears.

The secret sauce

PlumResearch mapped the themes behind the most-watched LatAm titles abroad, and the results read like the back of a pulpy paperback. Love comes out on top. But love on its own doesn't cross borders. Love plus murder does. So do secrets, betrayal, crime and a good old-fashioned royal power struggle.

Which gives a pretty clear formula:

And a few new flavours are starting to catch on:

Or, as the session put it: audiences want LatAm authenticity wrapped in genre-bending storytelling.

So what now?

The appetite for LatAm content is real, and in markets like the US it's still growing fast. But with global viewing plateauing, buyers are getting pickier. Making more won't cut it. Making the right thing will.

For producers, that means keeping the local flavour and serving it in a genre the world already loves. For buyers, it means looking beyond the usual suspects: the next global hit could just as easily come from Lima or Buenos Aires as from Bogotá or Mexico City. And for everyone, knowing where these shows are really being watched, and by whom, is the difference between a lucky guess and a smart bet.