Univision

The Early Years

Despite its contemporary status as an international media giant, Univision had humble origins. In 1961, Rene Anselmo, a Massachusetts native, purchased the San Antonio, Texas–based television station KWEX-TV. Anselmo transformed the station into the Spanish International Network (SIN), which was owned and operated by the Mexico-based broadcast corporation Telesistema Mexicano. Telesistema Mexicano provided SIN with the maximum amount of financing a foreign-based broadcaster was legally permitted to supply to a U.S.-based station (20 percent). The Mexican broadcast company also supplied SIN with all of its programming, although Anselmo did attempt to establish local news programming.

KWEX became the first exclusively Spanish-language channel in the United States, and the station provided programming to the local Spanish-speaking and Latino (primarily Mexican American) population of San Antonio. The success of KWEX led SIN to establish other Spanish-based television stations in other regions. By 1968, the network had established Spanish-language television stations in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and New York City.

The Spanish-speaking population of the United States increased dramatically during the 1970s and 1980s as a result of high rates of immigration from Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Central America. These trends served to expand SIN's broadcasting reach and raise its profits by providing the network with an ever-increasing source of potential viewers. SIN launched a premium subscription-based, Spanish-language cable network, Galavisión, on April 2, 1979. Based in Los Angeles, Galavisión broadcasts motion [Page 2126]pictures, sporting events, and telenovelas to paying customers in Florida, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. By 1984, the cable network had gained 100,000 subscribers, although Galavisión dropped its premium status and became a basic cable channel three years later. By the end of the decade, more than 300 cable providers in a dozen states carried Galavisión.

Improvements in satellite technology, along with the growing Hispanic/Latino population in the United States, made SIN the dominant provider of Spanish-language television programming in the United States throughout the 1980s. By 1982, SIN controlled 33 of the 35 Spanish-language TV stations in the nation. The company's profits more than quadrupled in less than a decade, growing from $10 million in 1978 to $45 million in 1984. SIN was renamed Univision in 1987 after the network sold its TV stations to Hallmark.

Univision soared to new heights during the 1990s, when Nielsen Media Research, which calculates the advertisement-contingent Nielsen Ratings that measure a television program's level of viewership, launched its Nielsen Hispanic Television Index (NHTI) in 1992. Also in 1992, Hallmark sold the network to a partnership comprising A. Jerrold Perenchio (an Anglo television producer), Televisa (a Mexican broadcast company), and Venevisa (a Venezuelan broadcast company). The creation of a ratings system for Spanish-language television provided an objective measure by which Univision could court advertisers to purchase air-time on its stations. By the mid-1990s, Univision catapulted to the position of fifth-most-watched network in the United States, after the Big Three (NBC, ABC, and CBS) and Fox.

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