Marcos Santana

Marcos Santana

Marcos Santana (born 1965) is the current president of NBCUniversal Telemundo Internacional. He previously served as president and chief operating officer of Tepuy International, a television distribution company he founded in 1989. Telemundo acquired Tepuy’s assets in late 2006, creating Telemundo Internacional and installing Santana as its president in early 2007. Santana is a current member of the Board of Telemundo and board for TVN Panama.

Santana was born in Caracas, Venezuela, to an economist and a homemaker. He is the youngest of five brothers. He holds a law degree and a master's degree in copyright.

Santana is the founding president of Telemundo Internacional, the division with headquarters in the United States that is responsible for the commercialization and distribution of Telemundo and NBC UNIVERSO’s original content, as well as that of other top producers. During Santana’s tenure as president, the company has become the second largest worldwide distributor of Spanish-language programming in the world with programs airing in more than 120 countries, and pay TV channels in almost 80 countries. Telemundo’s financial turnaround is mainly due to the decision to produce its own novelas, realities and series in the U.S., a factor credited to Santana’s influence.

Santana began his career in the legal department of French telecommunications company Sofretu. In 1987, he co-founded the production and distribution company Tepuy International to sell formats, cartoons, series and telenovelas and other Spanish-language content in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. Tepuy International began making and distributing documentaries and animated shows, but soon branched into telenovelas. The company found a niche between larger distributors like Televisa and TV Globo to bring Hispanic shows, mostly telenovelas, to the European market. An early success was Santana’s obtaining the distribution rights in 1993 to several popular Colombian telenovelas from RTI Colombia, Coestrellas, Jes, Caracol and selling them in Europe, Asia, Africa and other parts of South America. In 1994, Tepuy with office’s in Caracas, Madrid and Roma moved its headquarters to South Florida, eventually settling in Miami, a main hub of Hispanic television in the United States. Tepuy entered the market at the beginning of the boom in telenovelas and influenced the increasing sophistication of the genre produced by smaller independents by internationalizing the casts and accents and increasing production quality. In its first decade, Tepuy became a mainstay of the telenovela industry, successfully selling the traditionally Latin American product worldwide. The company also successfully pitched remakes of telenovelas, such as Mirada de Mujer, a 1997 Mexican remake of a 1990 Venezuelan storyline. As head of Tepuy, Santana was active in the hands-on creation and selection of many successful television projects with companies such as Telemundo-NBC, RTI, Disney, Sony, Caracol TV, Argos, Endemol, Gestmusic, Imagina, Televen, and Televisión Nacional de Chile, among others. He created and executed numerous co-production agreements with some of the most prestigious companies in the global television market, setting new industry standards. Tepuy’s successful collaboration with RTI Colombia led to the company becoming Telemundo’s internacional distribution partner. In 2005, Santana was approached by Telemundo president Don Browne to head program development at Telemundo Studios in Miami. In 2006, Telemundo bought Tepuy and brought the entire company in-house as Telemundo Internacional, with Santana named president in January 2007.

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