There are believers out there that the Spanish-language television audience is a force to be reckoned with – enough to invest big dollars.
Brazil’s Globosat and Colombia’s Caracol TV have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to launch a new Spanish-language pay-TV channel in the United States to compete with Univision and Telemundo.
The new partners plan to launch the joint venture in 2015, airing existing content from Globosat and Caracol TV, as well as original fiction programming developed for the U.S. market.
Gonzalo Córdoba Mallarino, President of Caracol Televisión and Alberto Pecegueiro, General Director of Globosat, signed the MOU on Monday, September 22.
Based in Rio de Janeiro, Globosat, part of the privately controlled Globo group, is the biggest pay-TV operator in Latin America. It has 34 Brazilian channels – including 15 HD channels, 10 PPV channels and 6 VOD channels.
Based in Bogotá, Caracol TV is part of the Valorem Group. It is one of Latin America’s largest producers of telenovelas, outputting 5,200 programming hours each year.
Caracol also operates its own U.S. Hispanic pay-TV channel, Caracol TV International, launched in 2003, which has over 2.1 million subscribers. It also owns a stake in WGEN-TV in Miami, which is currently the MundoFox affiliate.
MundoFox, a joint venture between Fox International Channels and RCN Colombia, is a Spanish-language broadcast channel announced in January and launched in August of 2012.