Cambios en la industria de la telenovela chilena en la Era Digital

This research analyzes the transformation of the Chilean telenovela industry in the Digital Age (Bruun, 2019) through the case study (Yin, 2014) of Al sur del corazón (Rencoret & Ávila, 2024), the first Chilean telenovela produced for Netflix by the country's only key agent: Megamedia. After observant participation (Agüero et al., 2019; Seim, 2024) of one year, semi-structured interviews were conducted (Hernández et al., 2014) with sixteen industry experts. Through inductive and deductive analysis (Abreu, 2015), emerging themes and power dynamics were narrowed down, creating a conceptual map that highlights critical areas in the production of Chilean telenovelas in order to identify the significant changes in the creation, production, broadcasting, and reception of telenovelas due to digital narrative (Alexander, 2017; Lambert & Hessler, 2018). The results show how digitalization has introduced new tools and practices at narrative, distribution, and consumption levels due to its expansion to streaming platforms, with "digital tropes" that have redefined the industry, and presented new challenges in the production, distribution, and consumption of telenovelas in Chile.