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A quiet Atlanta company is peddling the fights, cameras and action of Hollywood in Latin America.
Latin American Pay TV, which already has about 6 million subscribers, offers Latin American viewers both premium and basic cable channels featuring mostly American movies with Spanish subtitles.
The company has grown quickly and is poised to take a bigger bite out of the Latin American market, where 14 mil
lion households have some form of pay TV today and 30 million households are expected to have it by 2005, according to analysts.
LAPTV, which had revenues just, under $30 million in 1996, when it relocated here from Mexico City, expects to have $75 million in revenues this year, said CEO Genaro Rionda. When LAPTV arrived in Atlanta, it had six employees; today, it has about 60. Through an agreement with Crawford Communications Inc., which houses- LAPTV, the company uses many of Crawford's technical professionals, as well as its satellite, transmission and post-production facilities. LAPTV also has sales offices in Mexico, Argentina and Venezuela.
With revenues growing more than 20 percent a year, LAPTV has outpaced the cable market in Latin America, which is growing at only about 10 percent annually, Rionda said.
The company is 90 percent owned by four major U.S. studios Universal, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Paramount and 20th Century Fox - and 10 percent owned by an Argentine media mogul. It has...