Sánchez grants an open television to rebels expelled from Prisa

BarcelonaCountdown to a new free-to-air state-wide television in Spain. This has been decided by the council of ministers held this Tuesday, which grants the coveted DTT license to Global Alconaba, the group where the shareholders and executives of Prisa who ended up expelled from the group are integrated for trying to promote this project despite the reservations of the conglomerate's president, Joseph Oughourlian, who did not see it as economically viable.

“An Intereconomía but of the left” or “TelePedro” are the nicknames that television channel received when it was being designed –depending on the degree of malice of whoever named it– to indicate that there was an obvious link between its promoters and Moncloa. It so happens, moreover, that Spain is one of the few countries in Europe where television licenses are not granted by an independent regulatory body, but are given directly by the government, a practice that favors the politicization of these concessions.

The new channel is provisionally named Siete (acronym for Servicios Integrados de Entretenimiento Televisivo) and will be able to start broadcasting at the end of November, as the imperative is that, once the license is approved, the channel must be operational within a maximum of six months. Its launch will coincide with the end of Sánchez's term –if he completes it– and the beginning of the electoral cycle of the general elections theoretically scheduled for 2027. For a time, it was considered to revive the CNN brand –as a reference to the defunct CNN+ that Cuatro had before merging with Mediaset– to give journalistic prestige to the new television.

The programming will be fundamentally informative and, as transpired at the time it was being designed within Prisa, the aim was to create a low cost channel. At that time, a budget of 20 million euros was discussed, a figure that Oughourlian considered unrealistic, as audiovisual production is more expensive, even if the bulk of the schedule were to be filled with talk shows, which are relatively cheap to produce (or, at least, much more so than strictly informative programs).

The consortium is led by Prisa shareholders who, at the time, had the government's support to try to provoke a change in share majorities in the group to displace Oughourlian. These are Diego Prieto and Andrés Varela, joined by José Miguel Contreras, founder of Globomedia and La Sexta –a television channel born from licenses granted by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero–, who had previously been content director of the Prisa group before being dismissed. The executive has also been considered one of Sánchez's closest (informal) advisors on communication matters.

Other individuals expelled from Prisa in that internal mutiny ended up at Mediapro, such as Carlos Núñez, who joined as CEO, replacing Tatxo Benet, and Enric Hernández, who had been deputy to the executive president of Prisa Media and signed for the Catalan production company of Chinese capital this March, as director of business development. Mediapro will, in all likelihood, be the one to supply the technical and production equipment for this new channel, representing a further shift of its weight towards Madrid. Commercial exploitation is still pending finalization, but negotiations are underway with Pulsa, the company that already manages advertising for some of the small DTT and pay-TV channels.

An industrial partner to save the tender

The group of investors has had to seek an industrial partner, because the tender required a minimum of five years of television experience that they, on their own, could not provide. The solution has been to agree with the Argentine channel Telefé, which was bought last year by Gustavo Scaglione and José Luis Manzano. They will be the ones who will contribute 25% of the channel's capital, which will also always have to have a Spanish controlling majority, as the law requires it, given that television is one of the sectors considered strategic by the State.

The decision to grant the license to this group leaves Mediaset empty-handed, which was also vying for a new one. Currently, the conglomerate has seven channels (Telecinco, Cuatro, FDF, Boing, Divinity, Energy, and BeMad) and already surpasses the other monopoly channel, Atresmedia, which has six channels (Antena 3, La Sexta, Nova, Neox, Mega, and Atreseries). The Minister of Digital Transformation, Óscar Puente, has justified the expansion of the open television channel offering during his appearance by stating that new signal compression techniques allow for the addition of new offers.