TelevisaUnivision has announced it will be bringing a new global streaming service, ViX, to North and South America this week. Focusing primarily on Spanish-language entertainment, sports, and news content, it will be rolling out through key continental locations. Entertainment lawyer Los Angeles Brandon Blake of Blake & Wang P.A has more for us.
Widespread Latin and US Rollout
The platform will debut in major Spanish-speaking markets, including the U.S., México, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Perú, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panamá, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
ViX is spearheaded by the company created through a $4.8B merger in January this year, bringing a significant programming library to the table as well as the newly promised original content. Both Univision and Televisa have been well-known names on the Spanish-language programming scene, so they will have a wealth of assets to call on.\
A Cluttered Streaming Scene
While the Spanish-language-focused arm of the globally streaming market can probably carry the new entity, we can’t pretend that the overall streaming scene hasn’t become cluttered in recent years. Yet the new entity is taking a very bullish stance on this saturation, calling their specific niche ‘the last significant lane of streaming opportunity.’ They may be right. To date, there’s about 600M Spanish speakers in the world, and few English-language streaming companies have significant library assets in that market, something TelevisaUnivision can capitalize on.
The new streamer will offer a free AVOD tier across major platforms, including Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, both Apple iOS and Android mobile, and connected TV devices as well as their new website. Their SVOD tier will launch later in 2022, teasing about 10,000 new hours for its first year.
Will the new streamer manage to carve itself a share of the non-English language streaming market? It’s certainly well placed to do so, so it will be interesting to see what comes.
