Controversial businessman Rupert Murdoch's media giant News Corp. and Colombia's RCN Televisión announced a partnership to launch a Spanish-language television channel in the United States to compete with Univision and Telemundo, reported The Wall Street Journal.
The network channel MundoFox will begin transmission in the second half of 2012 and seeks to capture some of the growing Spanish-language ad revenue in the United States, which rose 7.4 percent in 2011 from the previous year. Money spent on English-language television advertising only rose 2.3 percent in the same period, according to the newspaper El Tiempo. The newspaper added that according to statistics from the U.S. Census, Hispanics make up 16.3 percent of the U.S. population and could represent one third of it by 2050.
While Fox's news content is seen as generally conservative in the United States, there is no set editorial policy for the new network, Gabriel Reyes, president of RCN Televisión, explained to BBC Mundo. He noted that the Colombian network would be responsible for generating news content for the channel through its international outlet, NTN24.
Last April, Fox launched Fox Hispanic Media, a Spanish-language media family made up of FoxDeportes, a sports channel; women's television channel Ultísima; and Nat Geo Mundo, according to the EFE news agency.
