TelevisaUnivision has sealed a deal with CBS and the NFL to carry Spanish-language broadcasts of Super Bowl LVIII next February.
The news was one of several announcements made Tuesday by the Hispanic media giant at its upfronts presentation at New York’s Pier 36, the complex along the East River known as Basketball City.
Vix, the streaming service launched in 2022 by TelevisaUnivision has now passed 30 million monthly active users, the company said. After initially coming to market with two tiers — one free and ad-supported and another pay tier branded Vix+ — the services combined into a streamlined, Vix-branded outlet earlier this year.
At Vix, the series Circo Gomez is now in development. The show, about a dysfunctional family running a shoddy traveling circus, derives from a first-look deal with Eugenio Derbez. In 2024, the streaming service will also debut El Extraño Retorno de Diana Salazar, a telenovela adaptation starring Angelique Boyer and Sebastian Rulli.
Along with the Super Bowl, TelevisaUnivision will broadcast the 48th edition of the Copa America soccer tournament from June 14 to July 14. It will be just the second time the U.S. hosts the event. Along with sports and news programming, live events factor heavily into the company’s slate. This year’s Latin Grammys will air live from Seville, Spain in the first international telecast for the show.
Donna Speciale, President of U.S. Advertising Sales and Marketing at TelevisaUnivision, said the company has brought in more than 110 new advertisers over the past year. She said more than 150 clients are using the company’s Hispanic household data graph, which now covers nearly 100% of all U.S. Hispanic households. She also continued to call for a transition to data-driven measurement, something she has been vocal about since co-founding industry consortium OpenAP while leading sales for Turner Broadcasting. Unlike others in her position, she isn’t heaping scorn on Nielsen. Instead, she called Nielsen’s Big Data Plus Panel a “huge step for equity,” adding that there is “finally a currency where Hispanics and their media behaviors are accurately measured.”
Pierluigi Gazzolo, CEO of Vix, told advertisers that 80% of viewing on Vix is of content not available elsewhere. As media companies continue to fret about their streaming efforts suppressing linear tune-in, the exec noted that 63% of Vix users are considered incremental to linear, “which means greater cross-platform reach for all of you.”
