Sánchez grants an open television to the rebels expelled from Prisa

BarcelonaCountdown for a new free-to-air television station of state scope 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 in which the shareholders and directors of Prisa are integrated, who ended up expelled from the group for trying to promote this project despite the reservations of the conglomerate's president, Joseph Oughourlian, who did not see it viable from an economic point of view.

“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 who named it – to indicate that there was an evident link between its promoters and Moncloa. It also happens 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 serves it out – 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 informational prestige to the new television.

The programming will be fundamentally informative and, as it became known 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 was filled with talk shows, which are relatively cheap to produce (or, at least, much more so than strictly informational programs).

The consortium is led by three Prisa shareholders who, at the time, had government support to try to provoke a change in the group's shareholding majorities in order to displace Oughourlian. These are Adolfo Utor, Diego Prieto, and Andrés Varela, joined by José Miguel Contreras, founder of Globomedia and La Sexta – a television born out of licenses granted by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero – who had previously been content director for 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, as is the case with Carlos Núñez, who joined as CEO, replacing Tatxo Benet, and Enric Hernández, who had been adjunct 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, most likely, be the one to supply the technical and production equipment for this new channel, which represents a further shift of its weight towards Madrid. Commercial exploitation is still pending closure, 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 capital of the channel, which will also always have to have a Spanish controlling majority, as the law obliges, since 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 bidding to receive 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 park during his appearance because new signal compression techniques allow for the addition of new offerings.