By WENDY LEE
STAFF WRITER
JULY 14, 2020
Richard Hull, chief strategy officer for VIX, a Miami-based Spanish language streaming service that has seen significant growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
The Edward James Olmos movie “Windows on the World,” about a Mexican family’s ordeal during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was scheduled to open on 100 theater screens nationwide this summer. Then, the novel coronavirus struck and shut down cinemas worldwide.
So the film’s producers scrambled to find another way to release the movie. They settled on a small but fast-growing streaming service called VIX. The platform has 20,000 hours of mostly Spanish-language content and has a large following in Mexico and in the U.S.
“All things being equal, they were the best,” said co-writer and producer Robert Mailer Anderson. “They understood the film.”
The high profile release in April was another boost for VIX. The Miami-based streaming service aims to be a hub for Spanish-language films and TV shows by catering to Latinos, who are huge consumers of Hollywood productions but remain underrepresented on the big screen. The service, which is free with ads, says it has 50 million monthly visitors on its website and 5 million app installs. Its audience — split evenly between the U.S. and Latin America — has doubled over the last two months.