The Federal Institute of Telecommunications (IFT) established an economic consideration of 501 million 597,721 pesos so that the company with business name “Compañía Internacional de Radio y Televisión, SA”, Concessionaire of virtual channel 10 in Mexico City and subsidiary of Image Group, can exploit that frequency for another twenty years, until Wednesday, January 1, 2042.
The amount of the consideration set by the IFT derives from an analysis of multiple technical and economic factors, among them that the concessionaire will get with the endorsement of the frequency the opportunity to cover a geographic area of 88 municipalities among the states of Mexico, Hidalgo and the capital, in addition to a population market more than 20 million inhabitants, and to also participate with 16.67% of the broadcast television frequencies available in the very lucrative Mexico City television market.
The concession company has thirty business days to accept the consideration required by the IFT and another thirty business days to present to that authority the documents that prove the consideration paid. The first term, of acceptance, would expire on December 8, and is extendable for a single occasion, until January 20, 2022. The last term for the Grupo Imagen subsidiary to present the payment would be March 7, 2022 If the payment of the consideration is not fulfilled, the ownership of the frequency will be reverted to the nation, said the IFT.
Compañía Internacional de Radio y Televisión, SA is the concessionaire of technical channel 27 in Mexico City, which broadcasts its contents through the bandwidth that ranges from 548 to 554 Megahertz, but which appears on the capital’s television sets as virtual channel 10. The channel is officially identified with the acronym XHTRES-TDT, after the authority responded to a request from the concessionaire to leave behind the old name of “XHRAE-TV, Channel 28”.
In January 2020, Grupo Imagen agreed with the company El Heraldo Media Group, in turn a subsidiary of the mercantile group GA Radiocomunicaciones SA de CV, the lease of the then Channel 28, which later changed by authorization to virtual channel 10 and after the disappearance of the content “Cadenatres” and the move of “Excelsior TV”To another space. In this way, GA Radiocomunicaciones was able to place the contents of its channel on channel 10 “Heraldo TV”.
Months earlier, these two economic groups had also agreed to a purchase and sale of spectrum frequencies for FM radio in the cities of Mexico and Guadalajara. Between June and August 2020, Grupo Imagen’s subsidiaries, Imagen Telecomunicaciones SA de CV and Administradora Arcángel SA de CV, sold the XHDL-FM 98.5 MHz and XHAV-FM 100.3 MHz frequencies to GA Radiocomunicaciones.
This is the first time that the regulator establishes an amount greater than 500 million pesos to endorse a TV spectrum concession in the last three years and is also due to the results of the last spectrum tender for open television, the IFT -6, in which the two new players in the local market, businessman Francisco Aguirre Gómez and Televisión Digital SA de CV of Grupo Multimedios paid 425 million 929,000 pesos each to broadcast in the capital. The amount of the consideration is also the result of an update of the population and other criteria related to the state of the economy.
A third actor interested in joining the capital’s television channel with his own channel is MVS Communications, which for a decade has been trying to take its 52Mx channel of pay television to the open. After a judicial process that ended in the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), the MVS group got the IFT will deliver an open television channel, without going through a bidding process.
The authority complied with the ruling and then established a first consideration of 61.3 million pesos for MVS to broadcast on open television for the remainder of the term of its concession for restricted TV and up to 333 million 680,689 pesos in time, if MVS intended to continue in the open another twenty years.
The amount of the consideration and the moment of the economy forced MVS to miss the opportunity, so it focused on multiplexed channel 6.4 that it rents to Multimedios to broadcast on CDMX.
In March 2015, Grupo Imagen won the opportunity to set up a new television network with national reach in Mexico, after winning 123 digital channels in a bid to cover up to 153 cities in the Republic and for a consideration of 1,808 million pesos.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx