After originally announcing plans earlier this year, on Thursday, TelevisaUnivision announced the release date and price points for their multi-national subscription streaming service Vix+. The streamer will come to screens in the United States and Mexico — along with much of Spanish-speaking Latin America — on July 21.
Vix+ will be available for American audiences at $6.99 each month, while Mexico will see an MX$119 (US$5.90) monthly fee. TelevisiaUnivision rolls out these plans in an effort to fill the content gap that has been facing Spanish-speaking cord-cutters for some time. Pierluigi Gazzolo, president and chief transformation officer at TelevisiaUnivision, believes Vix+ will represent a streamer service that “authentically reflects” Spanish-speaking cultures across the globe.
The idea to release a new streaming service was announced during the merger of Televisia and Univision, a $4.8 billion dollar deal that created the largest Spanish-language content provider in the industry. The initial release of its ad-supported platform Vix earlier this year brought over 40,000 hours of content, with Vix+ poised to raise that number to over 50,000 hours, with an additional 7,000 hours of live sports.
TelevisiaUnivision isn’t the only streamer looking to make waves in the multilingual content market. Earlier this month Roku announced its plans to bring Espacio Latino to its ad-supported Roku Channel. The media comes from existing Roku partners Lionsgate, Cinedigm, A+E networks, Sony Pictures Television, and others with original content also planned for the platform.
YouTube TV is also getting into the multilingual game by adding two Spanish-language plans to its own platform with add-on English/Spanish and Spanish only subscriptions.
TelevisiaUnivision hopes to become the largest Spanish-language-focused streaming service available, but in attempting to do so, tapping into an underserved market is also drawing in other contenders for the space. As other streamers make moves into multi-lingual territories, they may give TelevisiaUnivision a run for its money.
Currently, the recently unified company has been locked in a carriage dispute with live TV streaming service fuboTV. Fubo claims that TelevisiaUnivision is “seeking to unreasonably increase rates for each Hispanic customer.” For their part, TelevisiaUnivision claims “FuboTV has told us repeatedly that they are not willing to pay market rates to deliver Univision’s networks to Hispanic viewers.”
No matter the outcome of the dispute, Spanish-speaking consumers will be able to stream a substantial amount of programming on ViX+ in just over three weeks.