Sony Pictures Television (SPT) launched its new digital platform for Latin America, featuring Online Video Advertising as a tool which allows advertisers to add their products inside the multiple video contents for the Internet available on their sites.

“This new digital platform broadens our range of products to satisfy the ever-increasing needs of our customers, allowing them to benefit even more from our valuable Internet contents. Advertisers will now have an opportunity to relate their brands to entertaining and enriching contents”, said Irving Plonskier, senior vice president and general manager of Sony Pictures Television Ad Sales for Latin America.

SPT is focusing on this kind of internet miniseries,  which matches the ever-increasing need from advisers to present their products through video prerolls and postrolls (between 5 and 30 seconds), “a contact point which has shifted from a luxury to a need for those advertisers searching to promote their products or services effectively.”

Plonskier explains that they have “detected a growing trend in Latin American consumers (above Europe and the USA) to turn to the Internet for high quality entertainment video, phenomenon that has created another point for direct and sophisticated contact between brands and Latin Americans.”

A recent report published by Nielsen confirmed that, globally, 70% of consumers connected to the Internet devoted time to online video consumption during March 2010.

In accordance with this trend, the very first webisodes SPT will be launching are Urban Wolf, a digital 15 episode miniseries consisting of 4 minutes long webisodes aimed at a male public aged between 18 and 34.

Shot in Paris, in Urban Wolf, actor Vincent Sze (Hong Kong) plays a MIT graduate who goes to Paris for a job interview. As he walks through the city streets he starts noticing the numerous security cameras which are seemingly chasing him. What starts as a paranoid feeling becomes soon a terrifying fear as the sinister forces behind the cameras and technology start to emerge and chase the innocent American relentlessly, putting his survival instincts to the test.

Meanwhile, Private, another SPT’s new webisode (created by the very same producers of the Gossip Girl television series), is a 20 episode miniseries of 4 to 6 minutes long each, aimed at a female public aged between 18 and 24. It takes place at Easton Academy, a boarding school for affluent young girls where becoming a boarder doesn’t mean survival. Newly-arrived Reed Brennan succeeds in unmasking the truth behind Billings House, where fashion, dresses and sophisticated gadgets go hand-in-hand with jealousy, attacks and even murders, as the one occurred to her boyfriend.

The third digital production that SPT will offer their customers is the Video Game Awards presentation, the most important ceremony in the world of game business which features successful performers, musical shows and international television and Internet premieres. There are awards for the best games and for those who make them possible (this production, online and on air, is exclusively for Latin America, on Animax.)

 Exclusive previews of upcoming video games, interviews with their creators, business news, image galleries and interactive pages for their followers on Facebook, Friendster and Twitter among others stand out from the online content SPT will be offering on the Internet.

“Advertisers have realized that Internet videos make dialog with clients easier, increase brand positioning, attract potential buyers and cements support and loyalty to the brand,” Plonskier concluded.

Some of the clients who are already using the SPT digital platform, in charge of Juan Carlos Sanchez, business development director of the company, are the Ford motor company, the Telcel Telephone Company and Sony Electronics, a branch of the Japanese multinational company which manufactures home appliances and video game consoles.