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Telemundo

Telemundo, owned by NBCUniversal, is the second-largest Spanish-language television network in the United States, reaching 58 percent of Hispanic households. Unlike other Spanish-language television networks in the United States, like rival Univision, Telemundo produces most of its own telenovelas and is the second-largest Spanish-language content producer in the world. The English subtitles provided for many Telemundo programs have contributed to the popularity of the network's telenovelas. It is headquartered in the Miami suburb of Hialeah, Florida, with affiliates in 27 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, and studios in Miami.

History

Telemundo was founded by Angel Ramos in 1954. Ramos owned Puerto Rico's major newspaper, El Mundo; owned its first radio station, Radio El Mundo, WKAQ; and founded WKAQ-TV, branded as Telemundo. In its early years, WKAQ-TV was best known for its variety shows, like La Taberna India and La Farandula Corona. Soap operas eventually overtook variety shows as the channel's staple.

In the early 1980s, NetSpan was the second-largest Spanish-language television network in the United States. A part owner of one of the network's affiliates (Los Angeles's KVEA), Reliance Group Holdings, purchased NetSpan and a number of Spanish-language channels, including Blair Broadcasting, which by then was the holding company that owned WKAQ-TV/Telemundo. These channels were reorganized into the Telemundo Group in 1987, replacing NetSpan and quickly expanding. Coverage included the New York metropolitan area, Puerto Rico, Miami, Los Angeles, San Jose (California), Texas, New Mexico, Washington, D.C., Arizona, and San Francisco.

For a time, Telemundo outsourced its news to CNN, which produced Noticiero Telemundo CNN in Atlanta beginning in 1988. This changed as 24-hour news networks became more popular, prevalent, and profitable following the attention CNN drew during the Gulf War; and Telemundo launched Telenoticias, its Spanish-language 24-hour cable news network. A joint venture with Reuters, Spain's Antena 3, and Argentina's Artear, it was not successful and was sold to CBS, then was sold back to Telemundo and rebranded as Telemundo Internacional.

NBC Purchase

In 2002, after attracting attention with its increasingly successful telenovelas, Telemundo was purchased by NBC for $2.7 billion. Additional news programs were created, and local affiliates began to offer local news programs in the early morning. It was under NBC that Telemundo began subtitling many of its telenovelas in English and also began the practice of product placement. Fewer telenovelas were imported from Latin America as the network began producing a greater percentage of its own content, as it does today, though famous actors from Latin America, familiar to audiences through Latin American telenovelas, were hired. The network also now casts Spanish-speaking American-born actors. In 2009, Telemundo introduced high-definition programming in prime time, the first Spanish-language network to do so, as well as a Mexican cable network jointly owned with Televisa.

Telemundo's prime-time schedule uses the Turner Time strategy, named for the Turner Broadcasting System's 1980s and 1990s strategy whereby programs begin and end several minutes after the hour in order to encourage viewers to remain on Telemundo by forcing them to miss the first few minutes of competitors’ programming. Weekday prime-time programs are subtitled in English, which not only encourages viewership among curious non-Hispanics but also encourages viewing by households in which some members are fluent in Spanish and some are not. English-subtitled shows are also available during the day in some cases, particularly when the programming includes reruns of shows that originally ran in prime time.

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