El Chapo gets his close-up when season 14 of American Greed premieres on CNBC June 7. “Inside El Chapo’s Empire” examines the drug lord, a.k.a. Joaquin Guzman Loera, and how he ended up in U.S. custody. “Meet the Flores twins, Chicago-born drug dealers who earned the trust of the boss of the Sinaloa cartel – then helped the Feds put him away for life,” teases CNBC. 

There are six new episodes. Others are about California Congressman Duncan Hunter and his wife Margaret, insurance fraud schemer T.R. Wright and utility company Pacific Gas & Electric. 

The series “goes inside the dark side of the American Dream -- where money seduces, power corrupts, and smooth criminals will stop at nothing to get rich,” said CNBC. “Their complex scams leave victims’ lives in shambles. Each episode is a deep dive into the minds and actions of heartless crooks who live lives most people can only dream of. But how many luxury homes and exotic cars does it take to justify these white-collar crimes?”

Kurtis Productions produces American Greed. Mike West executive produces, while Luke Bauer does so for CNBC.

Fusion Media Group (FMG) and Netflix are co-producing the drama Tijuana, which will air in the U.S. on Univision and debut globally on Netflix. Production is scheduled to start next month.

The show sees the presidential front-runner shot, and the reporters of Tijuana Weekly covering the story. “But the facts they uncover run much deeper than the assassination. An insidious corruption has been allowed to grow in the shadows, and these reporters will risk their lives to bring it to light,” FMG said.

Daniel Posada is showrunner along with creator Zayre Ferrer. FMG Studios’ Story House is behind the project.

“Tijuana matters because this is a critical time to be talking about what journalists around the world face every day in the pursuit of the truth, particularly in Mexico,” said Camila Jimenez Villa, president and CEO of FMG Studios. “This expansion of our relationship with Netflix re-affirms the value of the content we’re producing. We will be increasing investment in production and expect to have nearly 200+ hours of programming by 2020 across scripted and unscripted in English and Spanish. We’ll continue to bet on up and coming creators that truly represent a broad spectrum of stories, characters and experiences, with a particular eye on female and multicultural showrunners, writers and directors.”

There was a similar setup involved for El Chapo, which Posada also worked on, with Netflix and FMG Studios’ Story House producing, and the show airing on Univision and Netflix.

Live TV isn’t dead, but it could sure use a jolt.

Networks have increasingly used Twitter, Facebook and other social-media outlets to further engage with their viewers, but a startup called Vivoom is looking to take that interaction to another level by enabling viewers to insert themselves digitally into live TV broadcasts.

The basic idea, in the TV context of Vivoom’s technology platform, is to have viewers record and post video of themselves that a programmer, can in turn, splice into a show — essentially a digital cameo.

Katherine Hays, Vivoom’s co-founder and CEO, has a keen eye for identifying trends in changing consumer behaviors.

Her last company, Massive, created an advertising network for video games. That effort — which for example inserted ads into the context of games with first-person shooters — helped Massive aggregate that audience and, according to Hays, reach as many 18-to-34-year-old men as any TV network. Microsoft bought Massive in 2006 for $280 million and reportedly shut down that unit in the fall of 2010.

Spotted: Consumer Behavior Shift
Hays said that in 2014 she saw an even bigger trend: that consumers, especially those younger than 40, tend to share their lives on social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat.

“This is an incredible change in consumer behavior, and there are real implications for products,” she said about what was going through her head as she delved deeper into this trend. “What if we can build a technology that helps every product be shareable?”

Though consumers can go direct to Twitter and Instagram to share directly, brands lose control of the relationship with the consumer (and the associated data) when they go that route, she stressed.

Vivoom’s approach is to enable partners to have more control of those shareable interactions (and open up the doors to monetization) with their products and services, while still enabling consumers, particularly younger ones, to distribute that content directly to various social networking channels.

Vivoom has since built the technology to make its idea go, and has already signed on several brands, companies and pro sports teams. They include Microsoft, Capital One, Johnson & Johnson, Maroon 5 and two National Basketball Association teams, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Clippers. Univision is the first TV programmer to come aboard.

“It’s really across industries, because almost everything can be shareable … and with our technology, brands are able to do that in a way that they can know that user and they can control that user’s experience,” Hays said.

The Vivoom and Univision partnership was announced in September at the Mobile World Congress Americas show in San Francisco.

They haven’t gone commercial with the relationship yet. But at the event they showed a mock-up of how viewers of El Chapo, the series about drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, could go about inserting themselves into a scene from the show (pictured).

In that demo, a bug would appear at a bottom corner of the screen directing viewers to shoot a video of themselves and explain how to upload it to Univision (via a website or through the programmer’s app, for example). The network would then pick one and insert it into that night’s broadcast.

“Their No. 1 goal,” Hays said of Univision’s work with Vivoom, “is to increase audience engagement with television” — particularly during commercial breaks, when viewers tend to divide their time with online social networks.

Other goals include driving more tune-in through the sharing aspect of the model, and monetizing the concept through sponsorships.

Hays said Vivoom’s technology is applicable across multiple types of programming, including awards shows, sporting events and entertainment series and dramas.

Though Univision has focused on second-screen engagements through elements like voting and trivia, those have generally been relegated to “isolated” experiences, Matt Kaplan, senior vice president of digital ad sales at Univision, explained during a panel session with Hays at the event. “The shift we’re seeing is about sharing,” he said, describing what’s coming as “Second-Screening 2.0” for TV networks.

Partners Already in Sharing Mood
Vivoom uses a set of technologies to underpin its platform. The first is in the form of a perpetual license to use Boris FX’s Sapphire visual effects engine for mobile that enables Vivoom to be creative in how viewers are inserted into a scene. Vivoom also has some patent pending technology around moderating capabilities that enables a brand gain control of what they are obtaining from consumers and viewers before it is published to the world. A third piece is a client portal that lets networks insert user-generated content into a linear broadcast.

There are several examples of how Vivoom’s technology has been used outside of the broadcast TV world to connect with fans.

Maroon 5, the pop band, has utilized the platform in ways that lets fans put themselves on the cover of its new album, Red Pill Blues, and insert themselves into a scene from its music video for the single, “Cold.”

During last year’s NBA Playoffs, the Boston Celtics enabled fans to shoot and share videos with branded filters that were republished and shown on the jumbo-tron at TD Garden, the team’s home arena.

El Chapo, a scripted drama based on the life of Mexican drug lord Joaquin Guzman, will debut on Univision in April, the network said.

The series is the first co-production between the broadcaster's Univision Story House production unit and OTT service Netflix. The series will be available on Netflix following its broadcast premiere.

Guzman -- who after being captured by Mexican authorities in 2014, escaped from a maximum security Mexican prison in 2015 and was recaptured nearly six months later -- is currently awaiting trial in New York.

The series combines "world-class reporting and insights from Univision News’ investigative team with an outstanding team of talented storytellers and producers,” said Camila Jiménez Villa, who oversees Univision Story House as president and chief content officer of Fusion Media Group.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán has certainly been getting lots of airtime on Univision’s networks these days.

So far, those appearances have been on the network’s newscasts, with in-depth coverage of the Mexican drug lord’s Jan. 8 capture by authorities after his third escape from prison.

Starting this fall, though, El Chapo’s story will become the grist for fiction, as Univision Communications-owned UniMás will air the new, “unauthorized” series Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán: El Varón de la Droga.

The drama is based on a novel by Andrés López López. Univision did not reveal a specific premiere date and time for Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán: El Varón de la Droga, nor did it disclose casting details.

In a statement, UniMás said the series “will bring audiences an extraordinarily authentic view of the inner workings and politics of the drug trafficking subculture.”

Univision Communications president of programming and content Alberto Ciurana said the story of “El Chapo” had been on his radar well before the drug lord’s capture earlier this month. The fact that Guzmán is in custody again — at least for now — gave UniMás the opportunity to start promoting the forthcoming series.

“The Chapo Guzmán story has been one of the most captivating stories of this past year, and we’re thrilled to bring an inside look into his world to our audiences,” Ciurana said. “Our team has been hard at work the past several months, developing a story that takes our audiences deep inside the dark and fascinating world of one of the most feared outlaws of all time.”

Guzmán’s desire to see his life made into a biographical film, ironically, is what led Mexican authorities to find him hiding in a Los Mochis home. As was widely reported, actor Sean Penn interviewed Guzmán last October for Rolling Stone magazine. It then emerged that the interview was arranged by one of Hispanic television’s biggest stars, Kate del Castillo.

Del Castillo has enjoyed a highly successful 25-year career as a protagonist in telenovelas such as Televisa’s 1991 Muchachitas, her breakthrough series; and Telemundo’s 2011 smash La Reina del Sur. The latter series is about a drug lord’s girlfriend who assumes control of his affairs after he is murdered.

Del Castillo has not yet spoken publicly about her involvement in Guzmán’s capture, but said Jan. 15 that she is ready to tell her side of the story. In an English Twitter post on Jan. 13, Del Castillo she thanked fans for her support and said: “Not surprisingly, many have chosen to make up items they think will make good stories and that aren’t truthful. I look forward to sharing my story with you.”

Even so, any validation of a friendship with the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel could greatly damage Del Castillo’s career. On Jan. 13, Mexico City-based newspaper Milenio published a series of text messages between Del Castillo and Guzmán, who had not yet been captured by Mexican authorities. The texts were “flirtatious” in nature, the newspaper noted.

Del Castillo was last seen on Spanish-language television as the lead in the Telemundo series Dueños del Paraíso, which concluded its run in April 2015. She also appeared in several episodes of The CW’s Jane the Virgin.