Televisa

Televisa is the largest Spanish-speaking media company (or if you decide to add up the other companies owned by Grupo Televisa or by any of the Azcárraga, a Mega Corp) was initially founded as Telesistema Mexicano in 1955, in Mexico City, by unifying three different channels under said banner and then exerting control over several smaller TV stations in the rest of Mexico as time went by. The "Air" channels (those available without subscritpion to any cable company) are:

• Canal Cinco (Channel Five): Provides anime, sitcoms, and movies on the weekends. Also airs matches of the Mexican soccer team.
• Canal De Las Estrellas (Channel of the Stars): Prime-time Soap Opera channel and news. Also airs matches of the Mexican soccer team.
• Galavisión: Rerun farm of foreign Soap Operas and from those already shown in the channel mentioned above; occasionally shows a soccer match and the Lucha Libre every now and then. It also airs matches of the Mexican soccer team. Not related at all to the American cable channel of the same name.
• And in many Mexican cities there will always be a channel operated by Televisa.

The cable channel lineup goes as this:

• Music channels:
  • Telehit: Originally a Pop music and Rock En Español focused network, established in the 90's, originally founded as a Latin American alternative to MTV, with more emphasis on Rock en Español (a blessing to said genre, as back then it got screwed over by them after the Avándaro fiasco). Nowadays it's filled with talk shows (that at least are better than those from MTV, although too mexican to be understood clearly by anyone outside of the country) and either electronic music or hip hop, after it branched out their Spanish music to Ritmoson Latino (and screwing the Rock en Español fandom again).
  • Ritmoson Latino: Created after Telehit's decay, it's now a pop music channel with some Reggaeton and whatever genre can be used in Spanish with the exception of regional music.
  • Bandamax: Norteño, Mariachi and Banda music. The genres are too regional in Mexico, though they find their appeal outside of the country (mostly in Southwestern USA due to the large amount of Mexican expatriates over there).
• News channels:
  • TDN: Sports news network: It doesn't air the Mexican national soccer team matches, but it does show a lot of documentaries about sports, and some underrepresented sport events. Sadly, they don't showcase the Mexican baseball league.
  • Foro TV: Recently founded to fill in the gap caused by competition by Milenio Televisión (another Mexican news network) and oddly enough, classic movies every Sunday noon.
  • Noticias Eco: An offshoot of its news show "Eco". It existed from 1987 to 2001.
• Entertainment channels:
  • American Network: Showcases American shows, soap operas, and series. And maybe a few
  • TLNovelas: Showcases old soap operas.
  • Clásico TV: Old series like Los Polivoces, Chespirito and Chiquilladas.
  • Cinema Golden Choice (1 and Edge): Movies.
  • De Película: Mexican movies.
  • Unicable: Univisión programming dump, with a few exceptions such as Gringo En México, Iron Chef and a few B-movies shown every now and then.

In addition to all of this, they also own the W Radio group, three soccer teams, a few media networks outside of Mexico, a few other businesses not related to media at all, and a low-cost airline.

In The Sixties and The Seventies, during the heights of the Cold War, it was the government's mouthpiece and it received a lot of flak regarding the Tlatelolco massacre (this, like the Mexican-American War, is a delicate issue amongst Mexicans, so avoid discussing it unless you are acquainted enough with anyone), which was completely covered up. Also, during the 1970s, it spawned one of its most beloved shows -- Chespirito, which in turn spawned El Chavo del Ocho and El Chapulín Colorado, both producing their fair share of memes that are still preserved into Latin American pop culture.

The Eighties and The Nineties were the Glory Days to this network, where many of their most known celebrities were launched, and their best programming was shown. Telenovelas such as El Abuelo y Yo, Carrusel, Bodas De Odio, and Cuna de Lobos being the most talked-about shows during The Eighties, and in The Nineties many telenovelas such as Esmeralda, Mar ía La Del Barrio, Coraz ón Salvaje, and La Usurpadora raved to the point that many of them were incredibly popular in Eastern Europe, and it is said that during the Kosovo War, militias used to make truces only to watch these telenovelas. Also prominent of this period were the "Historical Romance" telenovelas, holding love stories in the midst of the important events of Mexican history; examples of these works were "El Vuelo Del �guila" (Mexican Revolution), "La Antorcha Encendida" (Mexican Independence) and "El Carruaje" (post-French Intervention), and perhaps they were more known due to their attention to detail back then.

Also, during the 1990s, it was one of the main contributors to the Anime Boom of the Nineties in Mexico (alongside the other main channel, TV Azteca), showing Dragon Ball, Dragonball Z, Ranma ½, Pokémon, and Digimon (though seemingly, like their main competitor TV Azteca, they failed to notice the amounts of violence and UST in some of these "cartoons".

The 2000's are ambivalent regarding their results: They started to diversify their entertainment options by starting to make American and British-styled series, which were good but unfortunately they had failed due to bad management. Their news department has lost some credibility after they decided not to report on the kidnapping of the politician and former candidate Diego Fernández de Ceballos (to the point that even Jacobo Zabludovsky, former star anchor of the network, called them out on it). Their soapies aren't nearly as good as they were in the past^[1], and with the advent of the Internet, they have become extremely overprotective of their intelectual properties, to the point of handing badly written legal threats to people who posted even a single clip of their programming to the internet^[2] and they also tried to press into the Mexican Congress the infamous "Ley Televisa" (which was fortunately revoked due to public and independent media outrage). Most of those aspects are blamed on Bernardo Gómez Martínez, who became vicepresident of the company after Emilio Azcárraga Jean became its CEO (as a matter of fact, Emilio Azcárraga Milmo - Father of the current CEO and previous CEO before dying - really disliked Gómez Martínez, and thought of him as being a greedy Smug Snake). On the flipside, the good thing of said diversification is that they have been pressing for the use of HDTV in all of Mexico's public channels, given that most of the cable channels have not succeeded into going there, their other services getting better, and the seemingly unending stream of subpar soapies ended with the release of the miniseries "Gritos de Muerte y Libertad", in celebration of two centuries of Mexican independence, which was very well made and well researched for a change.

But on a more positive note regarding this media conglomerate, at least their sports commentators are really good (especially "El Perro" Bermúdez), managing to generate their own memes -- "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!" is just one of the many. They also popularized soccer in all of Mexico, since before the sixties most of the teams were located in Central Mexico, and the dominating sport was Baseball.

And that's Televisa in a nutshell.

Televisa programming is seen in the U.S. on Univision, and at times on Telemundo. However, they are going to launch El Canal de las Estrellas USA in 2017.

1. ↑ a notable example here is the 2009 remake of Corazón Salvaje, which due to Executive Meddling, two very disliked actors getting the leads and sloppy writing, tanked so hard that people in Esmas.com (Televisa's official public portal) celebrated when it was announced that they would pull the plug on it earlier than expected.
2. ↑ A notable, if hilarious example, was their threat to the Spanish sport streaming website Rojadirecta, where the legal threat was so sloppily written that Rojadirecta's webmaster just laughed it off.