Laura Fernández Espeso Departs Grup Mediapro

Laura Fernández Espeso, a major driver of Grup Mediapro dramatic international expansion over the last decade, is leaving the company where she took up the post of its general manager in January 2025. 

Fernández Espeso’s departure is understood to be amicable, and is part of a more general managerial restructuring at Grup Mediapro.  

Joining the Mediapro-owned Globomedia in 2009, Fernández Espeso, one of just a handful of executives in Spain with real TV work experience abroad, was named Grup Mediapro’s director of international content in 2015, just as international’s TV high-end drama revolution began to lift off, driving Grup Mediapro’s expansion abroad. 

Appointed corporate and TV director at The Mediapro Studio, housing Mediapro’s content business, which launched 2019, she became its CEO a year later. 

Under Fernández Espeso, The Mediapro Studio drove hard into top-notch creative talent, tapping Israel’s Ran Tellem, a primetime Emmy Award-winning executive producer on “Homeland,” and a year later Daniel Burman, a leading light of the New Argentine Cinema, buying into his label Oficina Burman, in Buenos Aires.  

Further moves have included the launch of j.v Moonlyon with Penelope Cruz, the purchase of Latin American services and production company Cimarrón, and backing for Erik Barmack’s L.A.-based Wild Sheep Content. 

Mediapro has also proved a pioneering force in international TV alliances, co-producing or linking to major broadcasters and studios on a score and more of series, on Wildside’s “The Young Pope” and “The New Pope” with Sky and HBO, the first also with Canal+;  with Viacom (“Victoria Small”) on four series, Prime Video (“The Boarding School: Las Cumbres”) and Hulu Japan (“The Head”).

Sony Pictures Television (“Implacables: Mexico”), Lionsgate+ (“Express), Warner Bros. Discovery (“Las Bravas”), BBC Studios and ZDF (“The Famous Five”), Movistar Plus+ (“Celeste”) and TelevisaUnivision’s ViX (“Las Pelotaris”) were further co-production partners, when Fernández Espeso served at The Mediapro Studio.

By the time Fernández Espeso was chosen as Variety’s International Media Woman of the Year in March 2024,  The Mediapro Studio was one of the biggest production-distribution global powerhouses based out of Southern Europe with an H.Q. in Madrid and 53 offices spread around the world. 

In May 2024 it announced new U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles to double down on U.S. and English-language production for the U.S. and global market, under “J.C.” Acosta.

At The Mediapro Studio, Fernández Espeso was in her element: Content creation in a globalized context is her passion. 

Under the majority ownership of Southwind Group, which houses China’s Hontai Capital, Grup Mediapro’s main challenge currently, the loss of a keystone contract to produce and transmit soccer games with La Liga, is of another order. 

Hontai Capital has appointed Sergio Oslé, ex-president of Movistar Plus+, who laid many of the foundations of its current subscriber resilience, such as a lower-cost SVOD offer, as Grup Mediapro’s new president from Jan. 2026. A close ally of Javier Tebas when at Movistar Plus+, Oslé worked hand in hand to modernize soccer broadcasts in Spain.

Fernández Espeso’s next appointment is unknown, but is unlikely to take her far from international content creation.