Television in Mexico
[2] Telenovelas are very traditional in Mexico, translated into many languages, and watched all over the world with famous names like Lucero, Thalía, Verónica Castro, Itati, Leticia Calderón and Victoria Ruffo.
Televisa, founded in 1955, is the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world and produces a wide range of programming, including telenovelas (soap operas), variety shows, sports, and news.
TV Azteca, established in 1993, is the second-largest television network in Mexico and offers a diverse lineup of programming, including telenovelas, reality shows, and sports.
The Mexican model of telenovelas (soap opera) – then to be replicated by other telenovela-producing countries in Latin America and Asia for most of the 1990s – usually involves a romantic couple that encounters many problems throughout the show's run, a villain and usually ends with a wedding.
The use of sexually themed episodes starring the leading couple of the story has been a common element through most Mexican (and even Latin American) telenovelas.
Previously, telenovelas were often thought to be used as a government tool to distract citizens from national issues, a reason cited for temporary decrease in their credibility and popular appeal.
Credited by media experts especially to Televisa's move in the early 1990s of exporting its telenovelas to parts of the world, this rivaled the wave of American sitcoms that had been broadcast worldwide in the same period.
For example, Verónica Castro's international fame grew when the novela she had starred in many years earlier, Los ricos también lloran in 1979, became a major hit in Russia.
Telenovelas, primarily those produced by Argos Comunicación, consequently addressed new themes, including poverty, political corruption, immigration and drug smuggling.
On November 21, 2016, Televisa released a telenovela titled La candidata (The Candidate) protagonized by actress Silvia Navarro as Regina Bárcenas (whom acts as the speculated fictional stand-in for Margarita Zavala) and Rafael Sánchez Navarro as her husband Alonso San Roman (which acts as the speculated fictional stand-in for Felipe Calderón).
The program deals with the experiences of a group of people who live in a Mexican neighborhood where its protagonist, is a poor orphan nicknamed "El Chavo" (which means "The Kid").
Ortiz de Pinedo was featured in the 2007 book Televisa presenta (presents), which takes a look back at 50 years of network television in Mexico.
Each episode features the interactions between these peculiar neighbors, where they deal with problems both real and imagined, such as ghosts, treasures, ripoffs, fights, etc..
Contemporary shows consist of Lorenza starring Bárbara Torres a flight attendant of obsessive character, Mi querida herencia (My Dear Inheritance) Carlos Fernández de León is a partying and irresponsible man who lives off his father's money.
According to critics, both the potentials and the pitfalls of Mexican television satire may be exemplified by El Privilegio de Mandar, a political comedy telenovela accused of being biased in favor of the governing party's candidate in the context of the 2006 Mexican general election,[10] and by Víctor Trujillo, a comedian and news host famous for his black humor and for his attacks on politicians.
With the exception of the short-lived but popular Televisión Independiente de México (1968–72), which TSM absorbed in 1973 to form Televisa, the latter saw no major commercial competition until 1993.
This took flight in 1972 when the government, through financier SOMEX, expropriated XHDF-TV in Mexico City and used it to form the base of a Canal 13 national network with repeaters across the country.
In the 1980s, XHTRM-TV channel 22, the first UHF television station in the Valle de México, came to air bringing TRM programming to the nation's capital.
The first cable system started to operate in the early 1960s in Monterrey, as a CATV service (an antenna at the top of the Loma Larga, which could get TV signals from Laredo, Texas and the Rio Grande Valley).
The Mexican broadcast conglomerate wanted to develop a dedicated pay-per-view network using the Japanese broadcast standard that would offer first-run Hollywood movies to prospective local owners of MUSE Hi-Vision equipment, which was known to cost upwards of US$30,000 at the time in Japan, as consumer equipment availability was in its infancy and low manufacturing volumes contributed to its high cost.
