There is a $1 tril­lion His­pan­ic media mar­ket to be claimed in the US in the next few years.

Who’s going to walk away from the table with the largest slice of the pie? As Jeff Berovi­ci and Dorothy Pomer­antz wrote for Forbes Mag­a­zine dat­ed August 6, 2012, “His­pan­ics, now under­served by adver­tis­ers, will be the most impor­tant U.S. growth mar­ket through mid cen­tu­ry if cur­rent trends continue.”

A pop­u­la­tion growth rate esti­mat­ed to approx­i­mate an increase of 170 per­cent, will soon result in Lati­nos mak­ing up every one in three Amer­i­can res­i­dents with a medi­an age of 27 years old, or the “per­fect age” for whom adver­tis­ers tar­get. The con­clu­sion of these sta­tis­tics is obvi­ous: the His­pan­ic media and con­sumers are the next goal for any com­pa­ny capa­ble of read­ing a spreadsheet.

The Top Com­pa­nies in Television

The big dog in His­pan­ic tele­vi­sion is Uni­vi­sion and has been since its found­ing in 1962. Now so large as to be an umbrel­la of tele­vi­sion media busi­ness­es, it includes Tele­fu­tu­ra, Glav­i­sion and three new net­works already start­ed in the first half of 2012. Accord­ing to Berovi­ci and Pomer­antz’s piece for Forbes Mag­a­zine, Uni­vi­sion was the sole tele­vi­sion sta­tion to broad­cast nation­al­ly in Span­ish for over two decades and now “reach­es a stag­ger­ing 97 per­cent of Span­ish-speak­ing households.”

A sec­ond com­peti­tor, more than a cou­ple of laps behind Uni­vi­sion and just in its infan­cy is Mund­o­Fox, anoth­er nation­al chan­nel to be broad­cast in Span­ish. Head­ed by Her­man Lopez, CEO of Fox Inter­na­tion­al Chan­nels, Mund­o­Fox hopes to make the sur­prise splash that FOX did to estab­lished net­work broad­cast two decades ago. There is room to grow, despite Uni­vi­sion’s appar­ent con­trol of the mar­ket. Lopez counts on the sta­tis­ti­cal find­ing that “His­pan­ics house­holds watch more TV each week … than the total US house­hold average.”

Final­ly, ear­li­er this spring, “CNN en Español launched three new shows, Café CNN, CNN Dinero and Conclusiones.”

Mixed Media

His­pan­ic radio, dai­ly news­pa­pers, week­ly news­pa­pers and Inter­net site had begun to launch joint and inter­re­lat­ed ven­tures to cap­ture wider audi­ences and gain greater cus­tomer loy­al­ty. For instance, one of the largest media mar­riages to date has been the announced plan between Uni­vi­sion and ABC news, as report­ed by ABC on August 7th, “for a muli­plat­form His­pan­ic news, lifestyle and enter­tain­ment pro­gram­ming ser­vice.” This style of diver­si­fi­ca­tion also seeks to gar­ner the atten­tion of both the younger and the old­er His­pan­ic audi­ences by using their pre­ferred form of interaction.

His­pan­ic pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies have also come into their own, par­tic­u­lar­ly for Sophia Ver­gara and her com­pa­ny, even as she holds the dis­tinc­tion of the high­est paid actress­es on tele­vi­sion. Even as she hold this dis­tinc­tion, her com­pa­ny is work­ing on oth­er projects to devel­op new tele­vi­sion shows, series and con­certs for a view­ing audi­ence soon to be a full third of Americans.