- Canela.TV saw 53% yoy growth as of November
- The Club Canela loyalty rewards program has 100,000 users
- Canela plans to expand into microcontent with Canelitas and develop a data-as-a-service product
- Strategic investment in AI, data and tech underpin the company’s growth initiatives
Canela Media marked growth in 2025 for its U.S. Hispanic-focused AVOD streamer, and to expand the business it plans to lean further into AI and data investments, including with new microcontent efforts and dialing up a data-as-a-service product to drive growth.
Philippe Guelton, who joined the Spanish-language free streamer in January as global president, after previously serving as CRO for Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, spoke to StreamTV Insider about traction so far and key initiatives on deck at the roughly five-year-old company.
Founded by Canela CEO Isabel Rafferty Zavala and her husband, Canela COO Michael Rafferty, Canela has grown to 68 million unique monthly users across Canela.TV, owned social channels, Canela Audience Solutions (CAS) and FutbolSites.
It’s taking an AI-powered and data-driven approach to utilizing audiences for advertisers, as well as on newer efforts like the Club Canela in-app loyalty rewards program that launched in April and has shown early success. It’s also leaning into tech and popular trends such as bite-sized formats with microcontent dubbed Canelitas that debuted last month and are poised to expand.
And with that monthly audience of 68 million verified Hispanic users, Guelton described how Canela’s now looking at how to leverage its unique first-party data to build on the CAS product, initially through precise incremental audience segments and then beyond.
Canela.TV marks viewership gains
As for growth on streaming, Canela.TV specifically grew 53% year-over-year as of November, with audiences spending 53% more time watching content on the free streamer.
In November Canela launched five new FAST channels on Amazon Fire TV – which follows an announcement that the company set a benchmark for Hispanic FAST streaming when it surpassed 6 million monthly viewing hours in June, marking an 88% increase from 3.2 million hours in June 2024.
“It’s been really exciting to see the growth of the audience, and still growing year-over-year,” Guelton said.
Canela has amassed 35,000 hours of content and per Guelton, content was the main driver of viewership growth, where he cited “huge investment in originals.”
A number of original series helped drive audience adoption in 2025, he said, as well as the acquisition of a class Mexican film library that has attracted viewership not only on Canela.TV but on its YouTube channels as well. He also cited acquired Turkish dramas as “some of the most popular content” on Canela.
Per Guelton, content expansions have helped user adoption and created a strong brand identity for the streamer with U.S. Hispanic audiences.
Club Canela shows early traction with 100,000 users
Since joining Canela at the start of 2025, Guelton categorized Club Canela as one initiative that’s been an inspiration to him.
Built internally, the platform and program brings together technology, content, brands and a dose of fun in a unique way with an intersection of casual gaming, viewing and loyalty rewards.
According to Guelton, Hispanic audiences over-index greatly on using loyalty rewards programs versus the general population, which means there’s interest for that type of relationship with the brand, and the company sees similar trends for casual gaming on the TV or mobile phone.
“We see Club Canela as a gamification of the content and how we create this additional level of interaction and engagement with the audience so that it becomes a fun experience on top of watching content,” Guelton said.
The more users watch, engage, share, respond to quizzes and other activities on Canela, the more they earn points that can be redeemed for exclusive content or applied for sweepstakes.
And notably, it’s shown early traction and is driving time spent on the platform.
Within six months Club Canela drove more than 417% growth in new registered profiles and over 24 million incremental viewing minutes for Canela content. Brand partners on board so far include Hyundai, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Verizon.
Today Club Canela has about 100,000 of what Guelton dubbed “super fans” that are using the platform and program.
“We see a huge uptick in engagement and time spent from these users,” he said, citing anywhere from 100-400% increase in time spent for those Club Canela users.
“And that translates directly into ARPU [average revenue per user]” for those particular viewers.
With audience and revenue gains to be had, Canela wants to grow the program gradually by adding more prizes and more benefits.
“But really, we’re seeing that we hit the sweet spot when it comes to understanding our audience and making them more loyal to the platform,” he added.
Club Canela gets AI virtual host Diego
In September Club Canela got AI-generated virtual host “Diego” to further gamify the experience with personalized challenges and rewards.
Diego, which was born out of Canela Studios’ AI Creative Solutions suite that also debuted this year, is meant to make the experience warmer on mobile and TV so that users feel like they’re interacting with someone. Guelton said to expect to see a lot more of the virtual host down the line. Canela’s even using him internally, including to open the company’s last town hall meeting.
As noted, Canela Club is also driving registered profiles – which is an aim for the free streamer as it provides information about users and relates to Canela’s focus on audience data for advertisers as a growth driver.
This wasn’t by accident, Guelton noted, as Club Canela “came out of strong focus and strategic investment in data,” which is targeted on the specific U.S. Hispanic audience it serves and feeds into near-term plans for new data products.
Data-as-a-service for advertisers presents opportunity
Canela started offering its CAS last year and the exec cited great traction. A primary reason being that the first-party data allows brands and advertisers to target U.S. Hispanic audiences not only on Canela platforms or Spanish-language content but reach those same users wherever they might watch content, including in English on a different platform.
Per Guelton, CAS “is already a big share of our revenue in terms of targeting these users.”
With the first phase successfully rolled out, it’s moving on to the next stage for data products. In addition to creating unique audience segments by layering first-party data, including behavioral and consumption data, Canela’s now able to identify the incrementality or additional unique reach from the audiences.
“Incrementality is a key word these days,” Guelton said, as agencies and advertisers want to make sure they’re buying additional audiences that they can’t reach elsewhere.
“Now for the first time we’re going to be able to determine how incremental this audience is,” he said, adding the capability is not just after the fact but programmed into campaigns that are tracked, measured and reported.
The second element of Canela’s data strategy is to turn it into something that's more purely a data-as-a-service product.
“There is a high demand for this kind of very precise and verified data” that’s deterministic, privacy compliant and CTV-based rather than from the online web, he contends.
Canela has about 20 million unique IDs that it can leverage, information which Guelton said is valuable on its own.
And while agencies and advertisers already utilize the company’s audience solutions to target on media buys, he said Canela’s having active conversations with a number of agencies and data platforms on “how they could use the data itself, whether it’s connected or not to any media buy.”
That marks the next extension and will come with insights or benchmarking where Canela can demonstrate that these campaigns perform better – on Canela today, but also on other from competing platforms and measurement.
This effort is what Guelton pegged as “the core of what’s driving the growth of the company on the data side.”
And Club Canela in that context serves as a consumer outreach from the data strategy, where it helps the company gather more information and become much closer to the audience.
He sees a lot of potential as Canela already has relationships with other major CTV platforms, makers and distributors that rely on the company to help find, measure and certify targeting capabilities for Hispanic audiences.
“It’s already a big driver” of Canela growth, Guelton said of CAS, but as the company refines and makes it more of a pure data product “the scale of the potential opportunity is much, much greater.”
Canela jumps into microcontent with Canelitas
In the pipe and leveraging AI in its programming strategy, Canela is hopping on the bite-sized microcontent boom with Canelitas, which were announced last month.
These series, split into short-form episodes spanning 3-4 minutes in length, will have a dedicated section on Canela.TV and be part of the company’s social strategy that leans on YouTube as well as clips and promotions on other platforms like TikTok.
Per Guelton, Canela plans to create original series for Canelitas, which it’s working on currently, and adapt existing content to the new format. That includes adaptations from its Mexican classic film library which will be shrunk into digestible micro episodes similar to formats seen on other popular microdrama apps in that they end on major cliff hangers, moments of drama or key plot points.
“We think that this is a great way to reintroduce existing content that is not necessarily seen and also to attract this younger audience,” Guelton said. Canelitas will be available in both vertical video and horizontal formats, which he views as a critical component.
Canela’s not the first Spanish-language streamer to jump on the microdrama moment. TelevisaUnivision has made an early foray into microdramas with vertical video episodes available on mobile for its ViX Spanish-language streamer (read more on that effort here).
AI helps create Canelitas efficiently
Canela’s use of AI for Canelitas isn’t about generating the content itself but helping to splice a 60-90-minute movie into 20-60 episodes of three minutes each in a compelling way that maintains a storyline while enticing viewers to watch the next one.
However, adapting existing content into micro episodes isn’t a simple slice and dice, according to Guelton. AI is leveraged here to help pick the right moments and identify elements that carry a story in order to zero in on the right time to cut different episodes – a process that would be very time consuming and manual without an AI assist.
“It’s not something that we could do at scale without that technology, but now we can,” he said. “Part of our exercise is working with the rights holders of some of the existing content as well as our own library and rethink and repurpose this content.”
It also plans to use AI in Canelitas for enhanced English dubbing and AI-driven virtual product placement for brands.
Canela is still working on the ads strategy for Canelitas, he said, but the microcontent will be ad-supported on Canela.TV and likely monetized slightly differently on social platforms.
And going back to data for a minute, Canela can reuse and retarget its audience on YouTube, where Canelitas is part of the social strategy as well. Since some Canelitas will live on YouTube, Guelton said the company is also able to monetize its own inventory on the platform.
“It’s going to help with the monetization of these even short-form content,” he said, noting sometimes Canela has short clips of certain movies “that have generated more revenue than the whole movie” on YouTube.
Overall, he sees the elements of Canela’s programming strategy together as an ecosystem where content lives in different formats across a variety of platforms.
As for other priorities heading into 2026, Guelton held up sports as a strong content focus, where it wants more live sports in addition to companion programming the platform already offers like weekly sports studio shows and recaps and interviews.
“We are definitely trying to secure as much live sports content as possible and it includes women’s sports,” he said, noting soccer is a huge driver for Hispanic audiences but that the company is looking at other sports as well.
Tech focus drives new business profile
Looking ahead, to Guelton, Canela is a company with media at its foundation but is becoming much more with recent and soon-to-be moves that lean into data and technology.
With investments in AI and other tech initiatives, he thinks it changes the business profile and outlook for the independent AVOD player that’s laser focused on U.S. Hispanic audiences.
“It's all about building a new product that is going to make us totally unique in the marketplace,” Guelton said.