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NEW DIRECTIONS IN LATINO AMERICAN CULTURES
From Telenovelas to
Netflix: Transnational,
Transverse Television
in Latin America
Joseph Straubhaar
Melissa Santillana
Vanesa de Macedo Higgins Joyce
Luiz Guilherme Duarte
New Directions in Latino American Cultures
Series Editors
Licia Fiol-Matta
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
New York University
New York, NY, USA
José Quiroga
Emory University
Atlanta, GA, USA
The series will publish book-length studies, essay collections, and readers
on sexualities and power, queer studies and class, feminisms and race,
post-coloniality and nationalism, music, media, and literature. Traditional,
transcultural, theoretically savvy, and politically sharp, this series will set
the stage for new directions in the changing field. We will accept well-
conceived, coherent book proposals, essay collections, and readers.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14745
Joseph Straubhaar • Melissa Santillana
Vanessa de Macedo Higgins Joyce
Luiz Guilherme Duarte
From Telenovelas to
Netflix: Transnational,
Transverse Television
in Latin America
Joseph Straubhaar Melissa Santillana
The University of Texas at Austin Department of Radio-Television-Film
Austin, TX, USA The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX, USA
Vanessa de Macedo Higgins Joyce
Texas State University–San Marcos Luiz Guilherme Duarte
San Marcos, TX, USA University of Central Florida
Orlando, FL, USA
New Directions in Latino American Cultures

ISBN 978-3-030-77469-1 ISBN 978-3-030-77470-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77470-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
We would first and foremost like to thank and acknowledge Kantar Media
and particularly Jimena Urquijo for giving us access to their TGI Latina
surveys from 2004 to 2014. That has provided us a truly unique opportu-
nity to pair theoretical concerns that several of us have been working on
for years with a remarkable base of data about audience preferences in
major metropolitan areas of eight Latin American countries. We were for-
tunate that such a survey was so comprehensive that most of our major
concerns and issues were covered in it, such as whether respondents pre-
ferred television and film from their nation, the region, the U.S., or
Europe; attitudes such as cosmopolitanism and also extremely detailed
demographic data that permitted us to examine issues of cultural and lin-
guistic capital, for example. We have intended this book to be theoretically
oriented and informed, first and foremost, but to have the opportunity to
put many of our theoretical ideas to an empirical test was also greatly
appreciated.
We would like to also strongly and heartily thank several former gradu-
ate students who worked on the original report from which the TGI
Latina data was extracted. Jeremiah Spence finished his doctorate at
University of Texas, examining this same data, and is an affiliated researcher
at UT. Vinicio Sinta, who finished his doctorate at University of Texas, is
now teaching at Texas A&M San Antonio. Adolfo Mora, who finished his
v
vi Acknowledgments
doctorate at University of Texas, is now teaching at Schreiner College near

San Antonio. Victor García Perdomo, who finished his doctorate at
University of Texas, is now Director of the MA Program at Universidad de
La Sabana, Colombia. We would also like to thank Deborah Castro
Marino, now at the University of Rotterdam, who worked on several arti-
cles that came out of this data and which are cited in this book.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Industries and Genres 1
Identities and Audiences 3
Ongoing Appeal of U.S. Programming in Latin America 4
Technologies that Increased the Flow of U.S. and Other Foreign
Programming into Latin America 5
The Streaming Television Revolution 6
Theorizing the Audiences for Foreign Television 7
Outline of the Rest of the Book 8
References 9
2 The Growth of Latin American Television 13

Introduction 13
Latin America: A Birthplace of International Communication
Theories 17
Television Eras in Latin America 19
Putting Latin America in the Context of the Other World
Regions and Countries 22
A Region of Broadcast Exporters and Importers 23
Brazil 23
Mexico 25
Argentina 26
Colombia 27
Venezuela 28
vii
viii Contents
Chile 30
Peru 31
Ecuador 32
Audience Television Preferences Sample and Methods 33
The Impact of Streaming Television 38
References 40
3 Why Latin American Audiences Stay Loyal to National

Broadcast Television 49
A History of National Preferences 50
Dependency on U.S. in Television 51
Cultural Imperialism 52
National Production 53
Telenovelas 53
The Introduction of Dramatic Series in Latin America 58
Cultural Proximity 59
Primary, Local or National, Cultural Proximity 61
Secondary, Regional (Geo-Cultural), or Cultural-Linguistic
Cultural Proximity 62
Ongoing Competition with Imported U.S. Television Programs
and Channels 63
Capitals, Class, Viewing Options, and Viewing Choices 64
Methodology 65
Measurements 66
Data Analysis 67
Limitations 67
The Context of Multichannel Viewing Growth 67
Preferences for National and Regional Television Programs 68
General Preferences for National Programming and Channels 68
Genre Preferences and Domestic Bias 71
News 72
Telenovelas 72
Regional Programming Preferences 74
National Program Preferences and SES 75
Analysis/Conclusion 76
References 79
Contents ix
4 The Persistence of the Popularity of US Television 87

Structural Factors Favoring the Commercial System of US
Television 88
Cultural Imperialism and the Deeper Structural Factors
Favoring the Popularity of US Television 90
The Persistence of US TV Programs on Broadcast Channels 93
The Structural Context for Latin American Elite Audiences 94
Impact of Transnational Pay-TV on the Increased Availability of
US TV 96
Why Audiences Began to Choose Foreign TV More Often 97
The Growing Appeal in Latin America of the Big Wave of US
Programs on Pay-TV 98
Changes in Latin American Audiences for US Television 99
Cultural, Economic, and Linguistic Capitals and Viewing
Preferences 103
Cultural Capital 104
Economic Capital 107
Linguistic Capital 111
Age 115
Conclusion: Predicting Foreign Television Preferences 116
References 118
5 Changing Class Formations and Changing Television

Viewing: The New Middle Class, Television and Pay
Television in Eight Latin American Countries 2004–2020123
Social Class and Television in Latin America 124
Elite Desires for Diversity on TV 127
Beyond the Elite Audience on Pay-TV 128
The Growth of the Middle Class in Latin America 130
The Role of the Lower-Middle Class 133
Breaking Down Class with Bourdieu’s Capitals to Predict
Multichannel Growth 134
Methodology 136
Findings: Income and Multichannel Penetration 137
Findings: Education and Multichannel Penetration 142
Education, Income, and Reasons for Getting Multichannel
Television 146
x Contents
The Bust Years: 2014–2019 150

Analysis and Conclusion 154
References 155
6 Streaming Television, Netflix, and Transverse

Transnationalism159
Introduction 159
Eras of Television and Streaming 160
Transversality 161
Reasons Why Streaming Is Increasingly Global 162
A Multiplicity of Models for Streaming 165
YouTube 166
Netflix 167
Disney+, HBO, Amazon Prime 170
Broad Range of Streaming Competitors in Latin America 171
Toward a Systematic Classification of the New Online Video
Players 173
Media Imperialism 177
Platform Imperialism 178
Streaming Services as Global and Cosmopolitan 179
Transverse Flows and Streaming Companies 180
Taste Clusters Across Borders and Algorithmic Globalization 182
Problems of Access to Streaming 183
Netflix Strategy in Latin America 184
Netflix and Quality Television 187
Multilingualism on Netflix 189
Netflix Production in Latin America 190
Conclusion 193
References 195
7 Netflix, Distinction, and Cosmopolitanism Among Latin

American Middle Class and Elite Audiences203
Distinction 204
Cosmopolitanism 207
Cosmopolitanism and Globalization 208
Cosmopolitanism and Bourdieu 209
Multiple Mobilities 211
Cultural Omnivores 212
Contents xi
Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism 213
Peripheral Cosmopolitanism 214
Cosmopolitans and Omnivores in Latin America 215
Cosmopolitanism and Globalized Media Preferences 219
Cosmopolitanism as Branding for Netflix and Others 220
Cosmopolitanism and Audience Preferences for U.S. and
European Television and Film 221
Conclusion 229
References 232
8 Conclusion237
National Preferences 237
Continuing Attraction and Power of Imported Programs and
U.S. Culture 240
The Impact of New Television Technologies 241
Increase in Lower-Middle Class Increases Pay-TV Use 242
Economic and Cultural Capital and the Appeal of Foreign TV 243
Television Over the Internet, Streaming Television 245
Latin American Cosmopolitan Audiences 248
References 251
Index255
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Multichannel penetration by country in Argentina, Brazil,

Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela,
2003–2014. (Source: TGI Latina) 35
Fig. 2.2 Cable, satellite, and non-multichannel households in
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru,
and Venezuela, 2004–2014. (Source: TGI Latina) 36
Fig. 2.3 Percentage of population using the internet in Latin America
2000–202039
Fig. 2.4 Mobile data traffic in exabytes per month. (Source: https://
www.statista.com/statistics/292859/north-america-mobile-
data-traffic/#statisticContainer) 40
Fig. 3.1 Latin American TV viewing interests (interested and very
interested) by origin in 2004, 2014. (Source: TGI Latina) 69
Fig. 3.2 Overall programming origin preferences, eight country
average 2004–2014. (Source: TGI Latina) 70
Fig. 3.3 Changing program preferences in Venezuela.
(Source: TGI Latina) 71
Fig. 3.4 Genres x national origin preferences. All countries. (Source:
TGI Latina) 72
Fig. 3.5 Trends in preference for regional Latin American
programming. (Source: TGI Latina) 73
Fig. 3.6 Latin American regional viewing interest x SES. All countries.
(Source: TGI Latina) 75
Fig. 4.1 Programming preferences in Latin America by origin of
programs, 2004–2014 100
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 4.2 Interest in programs and films from the USA by country:
2004, 2007, 2008, and 2013 101
Fig. 4.3 Interest in programs and films from Europe by country:
2004, 2007, 2008, and 2013 102
Fig. 4.4 Interest in programs and films from USA by cultural capital
2004–2014105
Fig. 4.5 Interest in programs and films from Europe by cultural capital
2004–2014106
Fig. 4.6 Interest in programs and films from U.S. by economic capital
2004–2014109
Fig. 4.7 Interest in programs and films from Europe by economic
capital 2004–2014 110
Fig. 4.8 Interest in foreign programs and films by linguistic capital
2004–2014113
Fig. 4.9 Interest in U.S. programs and films by linguistic capital by
countries 2004. (Source: TGI Latina) 114
Fig. 4.10 Interest in U.S. programs and films by age: 2004–2014 117
Fig. 5.1 Percentage-specific countries have of the total members of the
upper-middle class (next 20%) in the eight country sample 131
Fig. 5.2 Higher education for different social levels in Latin America 132
Fig. 5.3 Percentage-specific countries have of the total members of the
lower-middle class (next 30%) in the country sample 133
Fig. 5.4 Multichannel penetration in Latin America 2004–2014 138
Fig. 5.5 Multichannel penetration by Latin American countries
2004–2014139
Fig. 5.6 Multichannel penetration by income level: Combined Latin
America140
Fig. 5.7 Multichannel penetration Next 30% (income level) by country 141
Fig. 5.8 Multichannel penetration Bottom 40% (income level)
by country 142
Fig. 5.9 Multichannel penetration Top 10% (income level) by country 143
Fig. 5.10 Multichannel penetration by education achievement:
Combined Latin America 143
Fig. 5.11 Multichannel penetration by education achievement
(TERTIARY ONLY) by country 144
Fig. 5.12 Multichannel penetration by education achievement
(SECONDARY ONLY) by country 145
Fig. 5.13 Reasons for multichannel for all Latin American countries
(Total responses) 148
Fig. 5.14 Reasons for multichannel adoption by educational
achievement (combined Latin American countries) 149
Fig. 5.15 Reasons for multichannel adoption by income (combined
Latin American countries) 151
List of Figures xv
Fig. 6.1 OTT players with the most users 172

Fig. 7.1 Interest in TV programs from different origins among
cosmopolitans in various Latin American countries 223
Fig. 7.2 Interest in TV programs from different origins among
non-cosmopolitans in various Latin American countries 224
Fig. 7.3 Origin of program and film preference and cosmopolitan
attitudes225
Fig. 7.4 Cosmopolitans vs. Non-Cosmopolitans and origin of
program and film preferences 226
Fig. 7.5 Origin of program and film of preference and access to
different streaming platforms 227
Fig. 7.6 Access to streaming platforms and level of economic status 228
List of Tables
Table 2.1 An overview of trends across times and spaces in Latin

American TV 20
Table 5.1 Pew income distribution 2001 vs. 2011 126
Table 5.2 Latin America GDP declines in the second half of last decade
(annual variation in %) 134
Table 5.3 Comparison of SES and education on pay-TV penetration rate
increases145
Table 6.1 OTT players with the most users in Latin America-2019 174
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Industries and Genres

This book is about television in Latin America. Its national and regional
industries create most television programming there within the genres
that have developed over time in the region to please its audiences. Those
programs hold their attention for the advertising that pays for most of the
television systems in the region. However, quite a bit of the programming
has always come from the U.S., and to a lesser degree, Europe, and else-
where. With the technologies of cable, satellite and now streaming, that
inflow of foreign programming has increased hugely. While many in the
audience still prefer national programs, an increasing number among the
upper-middle and middle classes, particularly the young, are turning to
the new foreign outlets, like Netflix, Amazon, and Disney. This book
examines both dynamics in the audience and various theoretical under-
standings for them. It also examines the dynamics among the television
industries as both global and national actors create a variety of programs
and channels (broadcast, pay-TV, and streaming) to appeal to different
parts of the audience.
There are interesting questions about the political and economic con-
texts of the Latin American television industries. They grew up under a
great deal of influence by national governments (Sinclair and Straubhaar
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Straubhaar et al., From Telenovelas to Netflix: Transnational,
Transverse Television in Latin America, New Directions in Latino
American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77470-7_1
2 J. STRAUBHAAR ET AL.
(2013), by both national and foreign advertisers (Mattos, 1984), and by

fundamentally U.S. models of how to create programming for an
advertising-oriented industry (Fox, 1975; Straubhaar, 1984), such as the
now-famous case of how Colgate-Palmolive got Cuban producers to adapt
the U.S. soap opera into what became the Latin American telenovela
(Rivero, 2009). In terms of political economy, many researchers see this
development of commercial Latin American television under U.S. influ-
ence as part of a worldwide push to spread consumer capitalism, both
institutionally and through programs and advertisements that drew audi-
ences into a role as consumers rather than as citizens (Dorfman &
Mattlelart, 1975; Garcia Canclini, 2001). In a larger theoretical sense,
these developments have been seen as the dependency of Latin America
on U.S. models and resources (Cardoso & Faletto, 1979; Dagnino, 1973),
as well as part of larger structures of cultural imperialism (Nordenstreng &
Schiller, 1979; Schiller, 1969). All of these forces shape the examination
we make of Latin American television industries in Chap. 2.
As research on Latin American television progressed into the 1980s,
however, one of the things that stood out was how, despite their origins in
dependency and imperialism, the industries in the larger countries, par-
ticularly Brazil and Mexico, were beginning to produce a great deal of
nationally focused programming: melodrama, variety, comedy, music,
sports, and news (Straubhaar, 1984; Antola & Rogers, 1984). This con-
trasted with the original predictions of cultural and media imperialism
theories that there would be a one-way flow of television from the U.S. and
a few other countries into the rest of the world (Nordenstreng & Schiller,
1979), based in part on earlier empirical studies that showed a substan-
tially one-way flow in the early 1970s (Nordenstreng & Varis, 1974).
Culturally, that was thought to lead to a cultural threat to national identi-
ties, even cultural homogenization or synchronization (Beltran, 1978;
Hamelink, 1983).
The fact that Brazil and Mexico began to produce most of their own
programming, and even export it to other countries in the region (Antola
& Rogers, 1984; Sinclair, 1998; Straubhaar, 1981), created important
case studies in the global debate on television production and flow. Along
with evidence from Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Japan, and elsewhere
(Sinclair et al., 1996), there was growing evidence that a number of coun-
tries were breaking out of the limited television production aspect of
dependency and unbalanced flow of television. Chapter 2 of this book
examines the tensions between the ongoing forces of dependency,
1 INTRODUCTION 3
imperialism, and national governments’ push to produce more, in a form

of import-substitution industrialization of television (Straubhaar, 1981),
and the region’s major television producers. It also examines the forces of
genre development that came into greater scrutiny as researchers more
interested in cultural studies began to look at the growth of distinctive
genres, particularly telenovelas (Martin-Barbero, 1987; Mazziotti, 1993)
and variety shows, referred to in Brazil as shows de auditório (Miceli, 1972;
Sodre, 1972).
Identities and Audiences

The force that created a space in which both television industries and
genres could grow was the interest and preferences of Latin American
audiences, although media industries, genres, and audiences tend to grow
together (Holt & Perren, 2011; Jenkins & Deuze, 2008). It began to
become clear even in the mid-1960s that Latin American audiences pre-
ferred nationally produced television genres, telenovelas, variety shows,
comedy, music, news, and sports. For example, TV Globo launched a sta-
tion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1965, in partnership with Time-Life
Corporation, which recommended the Hollywood common wisdom of
programming a lot of imported shows from the U.S. (Wallach, 2011).
That programming approach put them in fourth place out of four stations
in ratings, which only improved when Globo’s management changed and
emphasized local production with news, music, variety, and telenovelas
(Wallach, 2011).
Anderson argued that national identities developed in nineteenth-
century Latin America and elsewhere as imagined communities based on
the interaction of several forces: national government measures such as
schools, maps, holidays, museums; the development of newspapers and
key works of nationally based fiction in national languages; and what he
called print capitalism—media industries that provided the basis for
extending both government ideas and commercial media content into the
population. Radio and then television extended that development much
further by reaching people who could not read or who lived beyond the
reach of print media (Porto, 2012), creating a new form of electronic capi-
talism (Appadurai, 1996).
Political leaders like Getúlio Vargas in Brazil used music, soccer, and
news on national radio to articulate broader national identities that
brought in working classes, rural populations, and racial groups previously
excluded by emphasizing music that came from Afro-Brazilian traditions

(Vianna, 1999). The military revolution of 1964 expanded television cov-
erage to ensure that all Brazilians got a Portuguese language national sig-
nal and counted on commercial television to expand the consumer
economy (Straubhaar, 1981; Wallach, 2011). Similarly, in Mexico La hora
nacional, a one-hour weekly radio program debuted in 1937, worked as a
project of musical nationalism, focusing on showcasing Mexican art music
that incorporated popular musical themes. This program that continues to
this day was one of the first efforts to use radio to build national cultural
and political unity (Hayes, 2006). Telenovela development in Brazil after
1968 refocused the genre on national themes and issues, similar to what
happened in Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela in the 1960s–1970s
(Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). As Chap. 3 shows, the nationally oriented
content proved very popular. Those countries too small or poor to pro-
duce telenovelas increasingly imported them from regional producers like
Brazil and Mexico (Roncagliolo, 1995).
Ongoing Appeal of U.S. Programming

in Latin America
Although national programming increasingly filled up most of the most

popular hours of broadcast on the main television networks of Latin
America, smaller stations continued to carry quite a bit of imported
U.S. programming. It was cheap, priced well below what it cost to pro-
duce an equivalent program in Latin America (Fox, 1975; Hoskins &
Mirus, 1988), and it was popular with enough of the audience to deliver a
profit (Read, 1976; Straubhaar, 1981). Chapter 4 explores how while
national programming was the most popular in terms of audience prefer-
ence, as reflected in surveys by the main regional survey and ratings group
(Kantar Media’s TGI survey), U.S. television programs and films were a
close second, in terms of overall preferences, much higher than either
regional Latin American or European programming.
The background to this relative popularity of U.S. programs can be
seen in the high levels of exposure that Latin American audiences have had
to U.S. films, music, cartoons, comics, and other media since the initial
explosion of Hollywood exports in the 1920–1930s (Guback & Varis,
1986; Schnitman, 1984). Hollywood dominated the Latin American mar-
ket, although Mexican films of their golden age in the 1940s were also
1 INTRODUCTION 5
fairly popular across the region (Berg, 2015; Ricalde & Irwin, 2013).
Other national cinemas struggled (Schnitman, 1984) or were thwarted by
the big American studios, so cinema audiences had a long process of cul-
tivation in which film was essentially North American. Since the same
Hollywood companies created much of the television programming
exported in the 1950s–1970s, the U.S. had an export advantage in televi-
sion as well, reflected in the 1974 UNESCO study (Nordenstreng &
Varis, 1974).
To dig beneath the surface of why U.S. programs remained popular, if
not as popular as national programs, Chap. 4 breaks down the audience by
social class, education, income, language ability, and other major audience
characteristics. In line with the predictions of French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu (1984, 1986), we found that more elite audiences and upper-
middle classes tended to prefer imported programs, which were seen in
context, as more sophisticated or at least as more distinct from popular
tastes, since the middle class on down to the working poor still preferred
national programs. The results are based on the Kantar TGI surveys of
preferences from 2004 to 2014. This audience analysis fits with long-
standing predictions by both dependency theory (Dagnino, 1973; Dos
Santos, 1978) and cultural imperialism theory (Beltran, 1978; Schiller,
1969) that Latin Americans and other elites tended to be drawn away
from national culture toward the cultures of colonial and post-colonial
powers. Chapter 4 also explores that historical process and the litera-
ture on it.
Technologies
that Increased the Flow of U.S. and Other Foreign
Programming into Latin America
Several generations of technology have helped television and film pro-
gramming from the U.S. and elsewhere penetrate further into Latin
America. The main broadcast networks that spread the farthest into rural
and small-town Latin America were usually the flagships that carried the
most national programming, such as TV Globo and Televisa (Sinclair &
Straubhaar, 2013). However, increasing availability of satellite channels at
lower cost enabled smaller networks, like SBT and Record in Brazil, which
carried more U.S. programming, to gain national distribution, too. The
big leaps forward in massive penetration of U.S. and European
programming in Latin America came with first, satellite and cable distribu-
tion of pay-TV foreign channels, and now, since 2011, new U.S.-based
streaming services, starting with Netflix in 2011, then Amazon Prime, and
accelerating recently as Disney+, HBO Max, and other services announced
international expansion since 2019.
Although some expected satellite and cable-based international televi-
sion to penetrate quickly and deeply into Latin America (Mattelart &
Schmucler, 1985), it languished outside of Argentina and Colombia,
where government takeovers or regulation kept national commercial tele-
vision networks less developed. Elsewhere, the preference for national
content on national networks kept the take-up of pay-TV low (Reis, 1999)
until after 2000, when three things began to change. Economic growth
since the 1990s in many countries allowed more people to move up into
the middle and upper-middle classes (Ferreira et al., 2012), which gave
them more purchasing power, making the acquisition of new forms of
television more affordable. Education reforms and subsidies to families
that allowed children to attend school—rather than working—gave many
people more education, hence more cultural capital, which we argue
began to change their tastes. Third, more national broadcasters began to
create their own satellite or cable-based pay-TV channels with attractive
national content, such as national films, national telenovela revivals,
national equivalents of documentary-based channels like Discovery, and
24-hour news. Unlike the 1980s–1990s, the expansion of pay-TV in the
largest Latin American nations increased access also to new national con-
tent, not just U.S. and European. Chapter 5 goes in-depth on the growth
of the Latin American lower-middle class and middle class, as well as the
subsequent growth of subscriptions to pay-TV, which brought in a great
deal more of U.S.-based channels such as CNN, HBO, MTV, Discovery,
and so on.
The Streaming Television Revolution

While pay-TV began to lose some subscribers after economic recessions in
several countries like Brazil after 2013, streaming has grown steadily since
Netflix entered the Latin American market in 2011. Streaming is turning
out to be quite diverse, with national, regional, and outside players, but
the most high-profile, highly used services are the U.S. streaming plat-
forms, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and so on. The new
U.S. streaming television companies seem to represent two new threats to
1 INTRODUCTION 7
Latin American television. First is a renewed wave of unbalanced flow or

media imperialism (Boyd-Barrett, 1977) from the U.S. to the region, in
the form of catalogs on Netflix that are very disproportionately U.S. in
origin (Penner & Straubhaar, 2020) or almost completely North American
in the case of Disney. Second is a new form of platform imperialism (Jin,
2017), in which some platforms like Netflix begin to have more diverse
contents from various global producing nations, including Brazil,
Colombia, and Mexico, but strategy-making, financial decisions to green-
light programs, and programming decisions, as well as the greatest part of
the financial benefit rest with the U.S.-based corporations (Birkinbine
et al., 2016).
Chapter 6 creates a typology for the different kinds of streaming plat-
forms in Latin America, within several overall categories, including their
focus and location, and looks at their relative impact via their subscription
or use numbers. It shows that the U.S. platforms, such as Netflix, Amazon,
and YouTube, do dominate the audience numbers. However, a large num-
ber of national platforms, such as Globoplay in Brazil and niche services
aimed at different kinds of films and programs across Latin America, are
growing and may offer some competition.
Theorizing the Audiences for Foreign Television

One of the main trends observed in this book is that audiences for U.S.,
European, and other television from beyond the region are growing in
Latin America, even though many parts of the audience remain remark-
ably loyal to local genres produced by national and regional industries.
Still, to have audience momentum in numbers away from national and
regional production is notable and significant. Fortunately, the TGI audi-
ence preference data we had been using allows us to examine some of the
theoretical trends in empirical terms in Chap. 7.
The dominant theorization emerged early as the exception to cultural
proximity theory (Straubhaar, 1981), built on Bourdieu’s cultural capital
theory (1984, 1986). He predicted that social elites and upper-middle
classes trying to become elite would prefer cultural products that were
identified as markers of elite status. In television and film, those had been
seen as products from the U.S. and Europe, back as far as cultural depen-
dency theory (Dagnino, 1973). Using the TGI data, there is in fact a
strong association between cultural capital (education), economic capital
(income), and linguistic capital (languages spoken or learned) and a
preference for U.S. and, to a lesser degree, European film, and television.
However, there was also a strong association with an alternative idea, that
audiences would not so much seek distinction by preferring traditionally
elite (imported) culture, but instead consume all kinds of culture, becom-
ing cultural omnivores (Peterson, 1992). That wasn’t true of people
marked solely by higher cultural capital, but it was true of people who held
all four of a set of attitudes that fits descriptions from the literature (Beck,
2002; Corpus Ong, 2009) for people who were more cosmopolitan,
which from its roots implies an attitude focused less on the local or national
and more on being a citizen of the world (Hannerz, 1997). The indicators
for such a group include interest in other cultures, interest in watching
news from abroad, interest in foreign travel, and interest in foreign food.
We thus outline three related cultural theories that were associated with
preferring U.S. and European television: a desire for elite cultural distinc-
tion (Bourdieu, 1984), cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2002), and cultural
omnivorousness (Peterson, 1992).
Outline of the Rest of the Book

By providing a summary of some of the main theoretical issues and some
of the historical antecedents of the broadcast, pay-TV, and streaming situ-
ations in the eight Latin American countries covered by the TGI Latina
surveys, the second chapter provides the grounds for the analyses of televi-
sion industries and audience behavior encompassed in the rest of the vol-
ume. Chapter 3 provides an analysis of audience programming preferences
for programs, channels, and films of national and regional origin. That
reviews the concept of cultural proximity, which predicts greater prefer-
ence for national and regional programs, looks at the socio-economic sta-
tus breakdown of who prefers these programs, and also looks at a
breakdown by genres.
Chapter 4 looks at the ongoing second preference among many Latin
American audiences, particularly in the major metropolitan areas for which
we have data, for U.S. or European programming. We find that this is
linked to the degree to which respondents have greater cultural capital
(education), economic capital (income), or linguistic capital (English lan-
guage ability for US or European programming, Spanish for Brazilians,
etc.), building on the theoretical insights of Pierre Bourdieu (1984).
Chapter 5 looks at the recent growth of the Latin American middle and
lower-middle socioeconomic classes or strata (Ferreira et al., 2012) as a
1 INTRODUCTION 9
prime driver of multichannel TV, a service formerly considered as a luxury

item. The somewhat different aspects of the social class represented by
economic capital versus cultural capital are contrasted, with cultural capital
seeming more important for obtaining multichannel access, as well as for
the desire for more kinds of channels and more channels beyond the
national television available to them. Chapter 6 looks at the growth of
streaming television in Latin America. It focuses substantially on Netflix as
the global subscription video on demand (SVOD) company that first
focused on Latin America in 2011, but also compares other global actors
such as Prime Video (SVOD), iTunes (transactional downloads and
VOD), and YouTube (advertising-supported VOD). Netflix’s strategy of
creating programs around the world, including Latin America, and then
promoting those series to global audiences, including those in the U.S., is
theorized and analyzed in terms of transversality. Other actors, such as
regional telecoms Telmex (Mexico) and Telefónica (Spain), major televi-
sion broadcasters like TV Globo and Televisa, and local/regional indepen-
dents and niche or genre-specific streaming operations have all entered the
Latin American streaming television market, numbering in the hundreds,
although far fewer get significant attention from audiences.
Chapter 7 examines the underlying attitudinal and behavioral traits
linked to cultural preferences for foreign or international television con-
tent, particularly among those in the upper-middle and upper classes, in
terms of possible pulls and drives. One is a drive for cultural and social
distinction as outlined by Bourdieu (1984). Another is cultural openness
or omnivorousness (Peterson, 1992) or cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2002;
Igarashi & Saito, 2014), in which audiences are drawn to a wider range of
media and not just those typically thought of as either popular or elite. We
use TGI data to examine those motives for preferences for television from
national, regional, U.S., or European sources.
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CHAPTER 2
The Growth of Latin American Television
Introduction
Latin American television has been notable around the world for both its
dependence on US models, advertising, and programs and the early
growth of some of its main networks, such as Televisa in Mexico and TV
Globo in Brazil, and their early push into creating most of their own pro-
gramming in the 1960s and 1970s, when many stations and networks
around the world were primarily importing U.S. or European programs
(Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). It was also one of the first strongly devel-
oped regional markets in television (Sinclair et al., 1996). It emerged as a
world exporter, particularly of telenovelas, in the 1980s and developed
satellite channels that carried Latin American programming to other parts
of the world. Recently, several Latin American networks and individual
producers have become active producers and co-producers for new stream-
ing services such as Netflix and other services that are entering the region,
such as HBO. Latin America has been the birthplace of several theories
that have influenced international and global media studies.
Those include theories of dependent development (Cardoso, 1973;
Evans, 1979); of cultural dependence (Beltran & Fox, 1980; Dagnino,
1973; Fox, 1992; Oliveira, 1986; Pasquali, 1977); of the corporatist inter-
play between national governments and private companies (Schwartzman,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Straubhaar et al., From Telenovelas to Netflix: Transnational,
Transverse Television in Latin America, New Directions in Latino
American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77470-7_2
1977); a related idea of political patrimonialism that looks at the extension

of the rulers’ power to elites, such as those in media, who serve the rulers’
needs (Pereira, 2016); and the captured liberal media system model, refer-
ring to the bias in favor of economic and political interests (Guerrero &
Márquez-Ramírez, 2014); of the also related idea of clientelism between
state authorities and media corporate owners (Hallin & Papathanassopoulos,
2002); of the hybrid development of cultural production and reception
between local, national and international forces and influences (Canclini,
1995; Martín-Barbero, 1993); of high audience impact by US television
programs (Beltran, 1978); and of increasing audience choice favoring
national and regional programs (Straubhaar, 1991a).
Some other useful theories from outside Latin America have been
applied to it. One is the concept of political parallelism, which analyzes
media systems, in terms of organizational connections between the news-
paper or network and any specific political parties or actors, manifested in
news, but also entertainment content and partisan audiences (Hallin,
2004). For instance, Televisa was explicitly tied to the PRI party in Mexico
(Fernández & Paxman, 2001) television licenses were traditionally given
to individuals with close ties to dominant parties in Latin America
(Waisbord, 2012), including Brazil (dos Santos, 2006) and TV Globo was
closely tied to the military governments in Brazil (Hertz, 1987). Much of
Latin American political economy and critical theory about media devel-
oped from the theories of the Frankfurt School about cultural industries
(Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972).
Overall theories of imperialism have been shown to still have strong
implications for culture, information, and media (Fuchs, 2010; Harvey,
2005b), as have formulations of neo-liberalism since the 1980s (Harvey,
2005a). The theory of cultural imperialism has likewise greatly affected
the development of Latin American ideas of the political economy of
media (Bolaño, 1999; Bolaño et al., 2005; Pasquali, 1977; Schiller, 1969)
and the assumption of strong ideological impacts of foreign media on
Latin America (Beltran, 1978; Dorfman & Mattelart, 1972; Schiller,
1976). The parallel theory of media imperialism, which focuses more spe-
cifically on unequal relations between media systems, has also affected
media analysis in Latin America (Boyd-Barrett, 1977; Boyd-Barrett &
Mirrlees, 2019), since it was often used to focus on unbalanced media
flows, foreign investment, and the impact of foreign advertising
(Fejes, 1981).
2 THE GROWTH OF LATIN AMERICAN TELEVISION 15
Semiotics has often been applied to television and cultural studies

within Latin America (Benavides, 2008; Carter, 2018; Morais, 2000),
particularly to genre analysis, such as Miceli’s and Sodre’s seminal analyses
of the television variety show/talk show in Brazil (Miceli, 1972; Sodre,
1972). Cultural studies and cultural anthropology have been applied to
issues like the development of the telenovela (Leal, 1986; Ortiz et al.,
1988). More recently, theories of global television studies (Havens, 2003;
Havens, 2006; Duarte, 2009; Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013) and media
industry studies (Holt & Perren, 2011; Havens et al., 2009) have been
applied to Latin American television, particularly to focus greater atten-
tion on the key actors within television studies, such as national entrepre-
neurs, producers, programmers, writers, and so on.
One of the key themes of this book, in terms of both theoretical devel-
opment, industry, and audience analysis, will be the dialectic and contra-
diction between national industry growth and audience response to it in
parallel to the continuing impact of US ideologies, models, genres, pro-
gramming, and the audience response to that. For the national television
industry growth, we will concentrate on theories of media and the nation-
state (corporatism, clientelism, patrimonialism, imagined communities,
and political economy) and theories of political economy, cultural and
media industry, both the Neo-Marxist forms by Horkheimer and Adorno
and more recent critical media industries theories. For the U.S. impact, we
will consider theories such as imperialism, colonialism, dependency, and
dependent development.
Another focus will be examining the growth of television industries.
That includes the colonial roots of some aspects of the Latin American
commercial media model (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013); the development
of Latin American patterns, such as models of family media empires with
a corporatist relationship to the government (Sinclair & Straubhaar,
2013); and the strong impact of US advertising, broadcasting, multichan-
nel and streaming television models (Waisbord, 1998), as well as the larger
context of US economic and cultural influence on the region. This sets a
pattern for this book in an analysis of national trends, regional trends, US
patterns that flow into the region, and larger influences by other regions,
such as Europe as well as more global trends, such as satellite-based televi-
sion (Duarte & Straubhaar, 2004) and now Internet-based streaming tele-
vision, such as YouTube and Netflix (Lobato, 2018).
A related focus is the relationship between national governments and

broadcasters. This is one of the most influential factors at the national level
of television development in Latin America (Waisbord, 1995). Historically,
nation-states were often seen as the most dominant force in national com-
munications, in close interaction with domestic and foreign capital (Evans,
1979). However, nations are often left reacting to new global media
developments, such as the current strong surge of globally based stream-
ing television into the region.
Another, related major force is the way that entrepreneurs, producers,
writers, programmers, and others have developed television approaches
and programs within its industrial pattern and within its relationship to the
government (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). Many of those actors are now
increasingly working directly with regional forces, provoking a surge in
the amount of inter-regional co-production, including those between
major national producers in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico with the new
wave of international streaming companies. Netflix now has dozens of co-
productions in the region, along with others such as HBO and Amazon.
Latin America was one of the first regions outside Europe and North
America to develop a new genre, the telenovela, with regional flows, first
in scripts in the 1950s, then in programs themselves by the 1970s.
However, this genre developed first in Cuba, sponsored by a US adver-
tiser, Colgate-Palmolive (Rivero, 2015), which shows the strong struc-
tural influence of US advertisers and other economic powers. Furthermore,
while regional television flow in telenovelas and other programs flourished
in Latin America, US television programs often remained more popular, as
the empirical core of this book will show.
What audiences choose to watch, what their genre preferences are, and
how they respond to new technological options is ultimately the most
important thing for the commercial industries that dominate Latin
American television. The trends noted above shape audience preferences
over the years and are an empirical and theoretical focus of this book. The
mass audience in Latin America has remained loyal to mass-oriented
genres, like the telenovela, while increasingly fracturing along class and
other lines. Some audiences are now driven by elite desires for cultural
distinction or cosmopolitanism, enabled by increased access to foreign
programming via cable/satellite pay-TV and now streaming TV. Many are
opting away from the popular mass genres of the past.
Latin America: A Birthplace of International

Communication Theories
Some of the main theories used to explain preferences by national audi-
ences for their own programming, like cultural proximity (Straubhaar,
1991), were developed first in Latin America to explain the fact that audi-
ences there already preferred national programming as early as the 1970s,
when the commonplace expectation in much of the world—supported by
research like that by UNESCO researchers at the time (Nordenstreng &
Varis, 1974)—was that most countries were importing most of their pro-
grams, mostly entertainment and mostly from the U.S. and that audiences
preferred that imported entertainment for its production quality, modern
contents, and so on (Collins, 1986). By the 1970s, major national net-
works like Televisa and TV Globo were already beginning to export their
programs to other countries in Latin America, and to some other markets
with the same language and culture, such as Portugal for Brazil. This
export drive boomed particularly in the 1990s, when a combination of
satellite and cable TV technologies created new distribution possibilities,
and a wave of deregulation, liberalization of competition by private net-
works, and privatization of some government networks created a large
number of new stations, television networks, and multichannel distribu-
tion systems with many spaces for new channels (Hoskins et al., 1997).
With this massive wave of new markets for programming, Latin American
programs, particularly from TV Globo and Televisa, flowed to many new
places in Western and Eastern Europe, in the Middle East, and in Africa,
among others (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013; Lopes, 2004).
Broadcast television networks also grew fairly powerful in some of the
other major Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia,
and Venezuela, leading them to create more of their own programming
and even export it to other Latin American countries (Roncagliolo, 1996).
As a result of domestic developments, like government takeovers of broad-
casters in Argentina and Venezuela at different times, some of these pro-
ducers declined, while others, like Colombia, rose as producers and
exporters (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). Through all of this, the idea
remained fairly constant that Latin American audiences tended to prefer
local, national, and regional programming. Among the smallest Latin
American countries, like the Dominican Republic (Straubhaar, 1991) or
Belize (Oliveira, 1986), the tendency since the 1980s was for them to
prefer imports from other Latin American countries, especially in prime

time for the largest audiences, rather than imports from the United States,
which tended to be pushed into less popular time slots in the morning,
afternoon, or late evening (Straubhaar, 2007).
This helps make sense of a phenomenon that surprised some observers
(Reis, 1999): why cable and satellite television penetration of households
and audience habits in most of Latin America was relatively low up through
the 1990s, especially compared to the boom in pay-TV that took place in
much of the world (Europe, Middle East, South, and East Asia) during
the 1980s–1990s (Baldwin & McEvoy, 1988; Price, 1999). In most coun-
tries and regions, the satellite and cable television booms of the
1980s–1990s served to bring in diversity through channels from abroad.
However, in most of Latin America, outside of Argentina and Colombia,
whose exceptional cases will be discussed below, the major impact of satel-
lite distribution was the enabling of larger number of rural areas to get
good signal for national channels (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013).
Latin America had correspondingly lagged behind in the similar boom
of VCRs throughout much of the world in the 1980s, which had enabled
audiences in many countries to start bringing entertainment that was miss-
ing (to audiences, at least) on national channels. However, Latin American
audiences were slow to adopt and buy VCRs, compared to the Middle
East, where purchases exploded quickly, in great part due to wider dissat-
isfaction with national television (Boyd et al., 1989). The common under-
standing for the low adoption of both VCRs and cable/satellite television
was that most Latin American audiences already had access to several
broadcast channels of high-quality news and entertainment, based on
national production, regional imports, and imports of some of the more
interesting U.S. and European programs and films (Boyd et al., 1989;
Reis, 1999; Straubhaar, 2007).
In fact, interviews with researchers and managers at MTV Brazil at sev-
eral points in the 1980s and 1990s revealed that they knew that they were
limited to a niche audience by their strategy (then) of primarily program-
ming U.S.—music videos on MTV as a pay-TV channel, with some lim-
ited ultrahigh frequency distribution. However, as they saw it at the time,
their advertisers were primarily interested in that niche audience, the rich-
est 10–15% of urban Brazilian youth, who as we will argue in Chaps. 4 and
5 have the cultural capital from higher quality education, language educa-
tion, and travel to really enjoy U.S. programs. So they were waiting for the
right moment to change their programming and massify their audience,

when pay-TV costs came down, more people could afford pay-TV,1 the
educated or cosmopolitan audience grew larger, and production costs for
adding more Brazilian video content would go down (Straubhaar, inter-
views at MTV São Paulo, 1989, 1994).
Television Eras in Latin America

One of the ways we will be organizing our analysis throughout the book
is in terms of eras of television, starting with some attention to the pre-
history of television in terms of the national systems that media, economic,
and cultural systems have fed into it. Then we focus on the initial decade
of the 1950s, and on the formative decades of the 1960s–1970s of national
TV genres and systems, and some increasingly direct US influence. Then
we focus on program maturity and new technological forms of flow (pay-
TV), starting in the 1980s and accelerating in the 2000s—all culminating
in the current era of streaming TV, starting with the entry of Netflix into
Latin America in 2010. Underlying these TV eras are corresponding eras
of national economic growth, national media growth, and regional and
global expansion of technology and television flows.
The other main axis of attention is what happens at the national level,
between economic development, nation-state policies, television industries,
genres, and producers, as well as the extension of those trends into the audi-
ence. Interwoven with that is what US economic trends and models, adver-
tisers, television industries, and genres are doing, on their own, and in their
interaction with Latin America. The next most pressing level of analysis is
regional, starting with the similarities of state policies and national industry
developments across the region. It also includes the flows of
producers/writers/directors, as well as scripts and genres from Cuba that
began with Fidel Castro, who had recently taken over Cuba, pushing the
personnel, genre expertise, and models of the most advanced commercial
television system in Latin American out of Cuba and into the rest of the
hemisphere, including the Hispanic US. Also key are the flows of shows and
of scripts/formats that began to circulate around the regions such as Brazil,
Mexico, and others that began to produce and then export television.
Finally, there are some influences and movements at a more global level, as
1
From this point on, the authors will use the terms multichannel television and pay-TV
interchangeably to refer to a subscription-based television service.
Table 2.1 An overview of trends across times and spaces in Latin American TV
1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s
National National live National Comes Grows in More More National
TV limited tosuffers from back, countries countries
almost all shrinks back
some cities US imports grows in as costs create create more in Peru,
most reduce telenovelas genres Venezuela
US Exports Exports flow Program Presence Some cable Cable flow Netflix
limited by heavily exports in prime flow to the to the increases
distribution flow time middle middle class flow to the
technology heavily reduced class increases middle class
Regional Cuban Cuban Regional Mexico, More Colombia Venezuela
telenovela professionals program Brazil exporters rises, out,
scripts flow spread to flow dominate Argentina Colombia
others begins moves to rises
formats
Europe, Little export Little export Some One of Present in Korean, Transverse
others activity activity export the driverssatellite, Turkish flow
activity of early cable, melodrama through
cable TV pay-TV Netflix
well as from other regions, including Europe, East Asia, and Turkey. These
two axes, over time and over space, are represented in Table 2.1.
Television had its Latin American inception in the 1950s and emerged
grounded upon an established radio industry, similar to the US model that
it drew upon (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). Television started as a rare
commodity, available to an elite in a few major cities as a prestigious com-
panion to family and community lives, as groups would gather around the
living room, presaging “new forms of sociality” (López, 2014). Television
was mainly live, with a limited transmission to a few urban centers.
Productions were mainly local, with some flow of Cuban (regional) tele-
novela scripts that were then co-produced locally (Rivero, 2015;
Straubhaar, 2011).
In the 1960s, with the advent of new and more widely available tech-
nology, such as videotaping programs that could be cycled around various
stations, television productions expanded their reach. Videotape allowed
for US exports to flow into Latin America at increasingly higher rates
(Wells, 1972), while technology such as telecommunication networks also
allowed for national expansion of television reach. Television expanded
further across national territories and became more widely available, even
though still highly prestigious and costly. National programming strug-
gled to compete with the heavy imports of the U.S. and other foreign
products (Fox, 1975; Wells, 1972).
By the 1970s, television was more widely available in most Latin

American countries, becoming more of a true mass medium. Supported
by a wider audience reach, television industries in the region invested in
national programming that appealed to the cultural preferences of national
audiences (Straubhaar, 1991; Sinclair, 1999). This was a time of experi-
mentation of formats and solidification of genres, particularly the tele-
novela, with strong national appeals to build national identities. The
regional flow of these new products increased (Antola & Rogers, 1984),
but US television programs continued to flow to Latin America
(Nordenstreng & Varis, 1974).
Latin American television established itself with strong national pro-
ductions by the 1980s, promoting local voices with nationally and region-
ally developed genres, characterized by lower production and distribution
costs. Mexican and Brazilian television emerged as lead exporters of
regional television flow (Roncagliolo, 1995), while US programming
flowing to Latin America started to move off prime time, at least on the
main channels (Straubhaar, 1984). It was also during the 1980s that early
cable and pay-TV emerged in Latin America, and foreign television access
was an early driver of cable adoption.
In the 1990s, televenovelas continued to surge as a genre, with addi-
tional Latin American countries producing their own versions. In this
same decade, cable or pay-TV emerged to change how television was con-
sumed in Latin America, segmenting the audiences by linguistic, eco-
nomic, and social capital (Straubhaar et al., 2016), as will be further
explained in this book. US programming started gushing through cable
television as well and gained popularity in Latin America with middle and
upper-middle classes. There was a shrinking of national production in
some countries, like Peru and Venezuela, spurred by the economic crises
in those countries, by politics in Venezuela, and perhaps from increased
competition by pay-TV.
The liberalization of several of the largest Latin American economies
through the turn of the century brought sweeping change to Latin
American television, including major regulatory changes that allowed
private national broadcast networks to grow in countries like Colombia,
where they had been limited before. The growth of a middle class with
the means to subscribe to subscription-based television services (Ferreira
et al., 2012), and the expansion of the Internet, which allowed more
massive access to new television services like YouTube, created both the
economic and technological bases for a challenge to the meaning of
television, like that earlier experienced in the US (Lotz, 2007, 2014) and
elsewhere.
Figure 2.1 illustrates the growth of the middle class in most Latin
American countries in the 2001–2011 period. In each of the eight coun-
tries, the percentage of the poor declined notably. Meanwhile, the per-
centage of middle and upper-middle classes grew in each of the eight
countries. By 2010, with changes in technology led by Internet penetra-
tion and greater digital image quality, streaming services arrived in Latin
America and quickly changed the dynamic of television in the region.
With Netflix, initially, in the 2010s, there is an increased flow of US prod-
ucts to Latin America, although Netflix also allowed, later on, for Latin
American products to flow within the region and internationally.
This is why Chap. 6 examines the growth of Internet-based television,
YouTube, Amazon, HBO, and particularly Netflix, which moved aggres-
sively into the region in 2011, ahead of the other subscription services,
seeming to target the upper-middle class and elites who had cultural and
economic capital as well as broadband access. In fact, as Chap. 7 examines,
to understand the dynamics of television audiences in Latin America now,
we need to dive deeper into the social structure and motives of the audience.
We examine upper-middle class and elite audiences in terms of three theo-
retical explanations (cultural capital and distinction, cultural omnivorous-
ness, and cosmopolitanism) for why they might increasingly be pursuing
more international content in pay-TV and streaming services like Netflix.
Putting Latin America in the Context of the Other

World Regions and Countries
For some researchers, it seems that Latin America has lagged behind some
other parts of the world in some aspects of media access and use. The three
aspects of media use that seem most crucial for comparison in this book
are television, pay-TV, and the Internet. Like Latin America, most other
countries have over 90% of people watching television. While some
Europeans have more subscriptions to pay-TV, on average, than Latin
America, some like Spain have less. Most of these countries have higher
Internet penetration than is common in Latin American but Spain, for
example, is comparable. In general, though we will find that Internet pen-
etration lags the more developed OECD countries, but resembles other
middle-income regions of the world (ITU, 2019).
A Region of Broadcast Exporters and Importers

Most broadcast television markets in Latin America are highly concen-
trated, with major networks like Televisa in Mexico, TV Globo in Brazil,
Clarin in Argentina, and Venevisión in Venezuela dominating their home
markets. This concentration, while highly disturbing to reformers, critics,
and some regulators, has enabled these same networks in most cases to
become powerful producers, producing highly popular, well-produced
programs that came to push imports out of most of the broadcast day
(Straubhaar, 2007). Most of these same networks, plus Caracol and RCN
in Colombia, have also been exporters to the region in at least some phases
of their existence. Analysts over the years have noted a top tier of regional
exports, usually just Televisa and TV Globo, plus a shifting second tier of
exporters that once included Venevision and RCNP—now disbanded
(Venezuela), which have now reduced production considerably (Acosta-
Alzuru, 2015), Clarin and related production companies in Argentina,
and recently has featured Caracol and RCN in Colombia (Piñon, 2014;
Roncagliolo, 1995). In a new phase, some, such as TV Globo, Clarin,
Caracol, and RCN, have also become major co-producers with others in
Latin America or with US Hispanic networks like Telemundo. TV Globo
and Televisa have also been major global exporters since the 1990s.
Brazil
Brazil has seven over-the-air national television networks, which include
five private and two public (Obitel, 2019) ones. Broadcast television
remains the most-consumed type of media in the country and, despite the
wide offerings of other television networks, viewership is highly concen-
trated among the four major networks (Reporters Without Borders,
2020). Globo continues to dominate the Brazilian broadcast TV market
through its general audience single network. The company’s audience
share amounted 38% of the audience share, followed far by SBT with 16%
and then closely by TV Record, with 15% of the audience share and
Bandeirantes, 3% of the market share (primarily male, based on news and
sports) (Obitel, 2019; Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013).
TV Globo grew dramatically since the 1960s to become a major
exporter and one of the world’s top broadcasters, and is considered the
25th biggest media corporation in the world (Birkinbine et al., 2016) with
revenues estimated at US$5 billion. TV Globo strategy for a long time was
to concentrate its audience in one channel, but since the 1990s, it has now
moved with the growth in the multichannel audience to create a number
of pay-TV channels in areas including news, telenovelas, education,
national films, children’s programming, and so on (Sinclair & Straubhaar,
2013). Even though Globo is still the nation’s absolute leader in television
and one of the world’s top broadcasters, its share of the Brazilian market
started to lose some ground in the 1990s (Borelli & Priolli, 2000).
Although considered hegemonic and, for times, criticized as a quasi-
monopoly (Hertz, 1987), Globo faces competitors, such as Sistema
Brasileira de Televisão (SBT), the number two network run by long-time
variety show host, Silvio Santos, which is explicitly targeted at the working
class and lower-middle class (Straubhaar, 2007). TV Record, the third-
largest network, whose majority owner, Edir Macedo, is a billionaire leader
of a growing and influential neo-pentecostal church, the Universal Church
of the Reign of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus). Since buying
the network in 1989, Macedo has been able to grow Record alongside his
church, and Record became the second biggest network in earnings and
viewership (de Souza Félix & Santi, 2018). Records programming includes
religious content, but most of its programming is news or entertainment,
including telenovelas that are often quite popular.
Building on the relative economic stability of the early 2000s, pay-TV
grew and expanded into the middle class, as we will explore in Chap. 5. A
major shock for the pay-TV industry occurred when the largest national
operators succumbed to debt and were forced to sell their systems to for-
eign firms. In 2012 Embratel—formerly the state long-distance monop-
oly, then privatized, and now a property of the Mexican telecommunications
juggernaut América Móvil—took over Net Brasil, which used to be
Globo’s largest pay-TV service in terms of the number of subscribers. This
acquisition turned América Móvil into the largest pay-TV operator in
Brazil—and all of Latin America—almost overnight (Sutherland, 2011),
despite the fact that Mexican law bars the company from operating televi-
sion services in its home country. In a parallel move, Editora Abril sold its
cable assets in 2011 to Telefónica of Spain, which is now the second-
largest provider in Brazil, with growing assets in other Latin American
countries as well. Even after losing Net Brasil, Grupo Globo continues to
play a visible role in the Brazilian pay-TV service industry as a minority
partner in the Sky/DIRECTV alliance, which in 2014 still had the second-
largest share of pay-TV subscribers in the country (ABTA, 2014). More
recently, the economic recession, alongside broadband capabilities, has
sped up the process of cutting subscriptions.
Mexico
A high concentration of the broadcast market is especially prominent in
Mexico, where up to 2014, Televisa and Televisión Azteca together com-
manded over 95% of the market through their nationwide over-the-air
networks (El Economista, 2014). Looking to break the long-standing
duopoly of TV Azteca and Televisa, the Mexican federal government
announced in 2014 that it would authorize the creation of two new
national over-the-air television networks. In 2016, Imagen TV was the
first commercial network to operate in Mexico after the 1993 privatization
of Imevision, now TV Azteca (Economía Hoy, 2016). Then Multimedios
TV started national transmissions in 2018 (Multimedios, 2018). However,
the two new networks make up for less than 12% of the market share
(Economía Hoy, 2018). In the last ten years, Televisa has consolidated its
hold of the Mexican pay-TV field by acquiring several of the largest
regional cable companies (Harrison, 2013) and establishing informal alli-
ances with the largest remaining independent cable operator Megacable.
Mexico has a total of ten over-the-air national networks, the privately
owned Televisa, TV Azteca, Imagen TV, and Multimedios, and three pub-
lic networks: Once TV, Conaculta, and Una Voz Con Todos. In Mexico,
Televisa and TV Azteca, for decades commanded over 95% of the TV
broadcast market (El Economista, 2014). Mexican President Enrique
Peña Nieto approved a telecommunication reform in 2013, that among
other things included opening the bidding for two national over-the-air
private networks and eliminating barriers for foreign investment in the
sector. The reform resulted in the consolidation of two new national net-
works, Imagen TV and Multimedios TV, and the arrival of AT&T (Forbes
México, 2017). While Imagen TV and Multimedios TV are now compet-
ing with TV Azteca and Televisa, the market remains highly concentrated.
Five companies share 66% of over-the-air TV. Televisa (259) and TV
Azteca (179) remain giants with more than half of all local TV stations
(53%). Followed by Grupo Imagen (46), Telsulsa (31) and Grupo
Multimedios (19) who together only make for 12.3% of the market
(Economía Hoy 2018).
Between Multimedios, Televisa, and TV Azteca, they operate about
411 local TV stations around the country (Obitel, 2019). On the one
hand, one of the newly added networks, Multimedios TV, which origi-
nated in the industrial Northern metropolitan city of Monterrey where it
operated for 20 years before going national, reached 46 million viewers

(Franco et al., 2019). On the other hand, the American AT&T who
announced it would invest $3000 million in Mexico (Forbes México
2017) had to partner with the Spanish Telefonica to compete with Carlos
Slim’s America Movil who still holds nearly two-thirds of mobile lines in
Mexico (Love, 2019). In spite of the 2013 reform, the two telecommuni-
cation companies have struggled to fight Slim’s monopoly.
Multichannel penetration remains strong in Mexico where for every
100 homes, 67 have access to it. The main competitor as of 2018 was Izzi,
owned by Televisa, claiming 30% of total pay-TV subscriptions in the
country, followed by Sky (also owned by Televisa) with 20%, Megacable
with 17%, and Dish with 17% (Franco et al. 2019). Scholars in Mexico
(Franco et al. 2019) indicate the formula for telenovelas is starting to
change. In 2018, telenovelas tend to have fewer episodes, while producers
and creators favored the “super series” or telenovelas with less than 80
episodes. The authors argue these recent changes might be linked to the
VoD logic. In that same vein, TV Azteca, the second most important net-
work in the country, announced they will stop producing telenovelas
claiming that audiences have changed. The network is now investing more
time and money in reality shows including Máster Chef and La Voz
Mexico. The broadcast of regional telenovelas in Mexico also declined
since TV Azteca and Imagen TV stopped exhibiting Brazilian telenovelas.
Imagen TV started to add Turkish telenovelas to its programming
(Obitel, 2019).
Netflix has a strong presence in Mexico where it has produced success-
ful TV shows like Luis Miguel, El Chapo, Club de Cuervos, Ingobernable,
and La Casa de las Flores. In 2018, Mexico was the second country, after
the United States, where Netflix produced the most original content.
Argentina
Argentina presents a special case in the history of broadcasting in Latin
America. The nationalization of broadcast television producing stations
and networks by the Peronist government in 1974 restricted the growth
of the television field, which in its early years followed a commercial orien-
tation similar to that in other Latin American countries (Galperin, 2000).
The military governments that expelled Peron by a coup in 1967 main-
tained the nationalization of television stations until their exit in 1983. It
was reprivatized by a new government in 1984, but the delayed expansion
of broadcast TV in Argentina, along with the obstacles posed by the coun-

try’s topography forced many households to use cable services to gain
access to TV channels. Thus, multichannel television in Argentina had a
considerably larger user base than other countries in Latin America, even
before the explosion of multichannel and pay-TV in the region
(Bulla, 2009).
Two major players dominate national broadcast television: the multi-
media conglomerate Grupo Clarín, owner and operator of Canal 13, and
Spain-based telecommunications powerhouse Telefónica, which runs
Telefe. In 2012, both networks controlled up to 64% of the market (Boas,
2012). Based on steady increases in production and export, Argentina
joined several other Latin American countries as “new exporters,” (Sinclair,
2020). With the growth of pay-TV, which started from a high base, pay-
TV grew slowly until 2014 in Argentina, helped change the patterns of TV
imports, and stimulated new content production arrangements. Clarín,
for example, joined forces with independent producers Polka and Ideas
del Sur (Becerra et al., 2014). Mexico and Brazil remain the biggest
exporters and producers of Latin American television programming, but
in recent years, Argentina and Colombia are increasingly prominent in
producing and exporting telenovelas and unscripted formats, such as game
shows and reality TV (Sinclair, 2004).
Colombia
Colombia was another country in which state control delayed the devel-
opment of a commercial broadcast industry with major networks. The
country had a mixed system for the allocation of broadcast licenses, in
which the National Television Authority (Autoridad Nacional de
Televisión, or ANTV) owned all transmission facilities for the only two
television channels with national coverage, and assigned or rented indi-
vidual airtime shares to private production companies (Arango Forero
et al., 2010). This scheme prevented private media concentration and
growth of TV networks with a strong identity like Televisa or Globo until
the 1990s.
Initial privatization in 1966 failed, but liberalized competition began
with regional networks in 1984. The consolidation of this period gave way
to the emergence of a Colombian style of telenovelas, whose national style
included irony and humor and a Colombian identity (Piñon, 2014). Some
hugely successful telenovelas, such as Yo Soy Betty, La Fea paved the way
to the increasing international viewership of Colombian television (Piñon,

2014). Colombia became a hub for telenovela production catering to the
Latinx audience in the US as well as the regional market (Piñon, 2014).
After the national government reformed the broadcasting law in 1998,
permitting fully privatized network ownership, the private media con-
glomerates RCN and Caracol received licenses to operate the two national
channels for ten years. With the maturing television industry and in an
effort toward less dependency on the state, the Colombian industry
pushed to an international market and partnership expansion (Piñon,
2014). RCN and Caracol have established international alliances to dis-
tribute and co-produce fiction content: the former with Televisa and
Univision, and the latter with Telemundo (Arango et al., 2009).
In 2008, the licenses were renewed for another ten years (Arango-
Forero, 2013). Colombia currently has five over-the-air national television
networks, the private Caracol (48.20% of audience share), RCN (18.11%
of audience share), Canal Uno (6.71% of audience share) and the two
public Señal Colombia (4.45%) and Canal Institucional (0.93%) (Obitel,
2019). In this same period, pay-TV growth continued strongly, surpassing
the penetration rate of Argentina, reaching over 90% penetration, which is
higher than the U.S. So habits of searching for programming in a non-
national network environment, that grew prior to 1998, coupled with
strong economic growth, seem to have established pay-TV penetration at
a level very unusual by Latin American standards. Concerned TV distribu-
tors attribute this incredible penetration rate to rampant piracy and infor-
mal cable services, but various serious providers also were attracted to the
growingly stable market.
Venezuela
Venezuela developed one of the strongest broadcasting systems in the
region in the second half of the twentieth century. The conglomerates that
led the field for most of its history—the Cisneros and Phelps/Granier
groups—not only produced and exported Venezuelan fiction to other
countries in the region but were also involved in some of the first region-
wide multichannel initiatives (Gibens, 2009; Duarte, 2001). Over the fol-
lowing decades, the country developed a strong television production
system, becoming one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of
telenovelas.
For most of the history of Venezuelan broadcasting, two family-

controlled conglomerates dominated the TV field: the Cisneros Group,
owner of Venevisión, and the Phelps/Granier Group, controller of RCTV
(Gibens, 2009). However, in the 2000s, the field underwent a significant
reconfiguration when the contentious relationship between the national
government and the RCTV led to the cancelation of its broadcasting
license by President Chavez in 2007. RCTV’s share of the spectrum was
then used by the Venezuelan government for a new public station called
Televisora Venezolana Social, or TVes (Gibens, 2009; El Universal, 2014).
Venevisión was forced to curtail or modify any programming considered
oppositional. This had a tremendous impact on national production and
audience interest in it, with telenovela production falling to less than one
a year and Venezuela turning to import telenovelas from others (Acosta-
Alzuru, 2015).
Venezuelan broadcasting companies were closely involved in some of
the first initiatives to establish pan-regional pay-TV channels and ser-
vices. For example, the Cisneros Group was one of the key players in the
expansion of DIRECTV to Latin America (Duarte, 2001) and at one
point the Phelps/Granier group operated Gems, a regional cable chan-
nel aimed at women (Gibens, 2009). Back in the 1990s, HBO had its
first foray into Latin America through a partnership with Omnivision, a
Venezuelan cable provider that resulted in the launch of HBO Olé
(Guilder, 1991). According to the most recent available data, DTH
satellite subscriptions account for two-thirds of pay-TV users in the
country, with operators DIRECTV and Cantv as market leaders
(Conatel, n.d.-a). Other multichannel operators highlighted by the
government in its industry statistics are Cablevision, Telefónica, and
Netuno (Conatel, n.d.-b).
The recent decline in cable penetration and relatively stagnant satellite
dish growth is the result of the country’s economic isolation and social
unrest, leading to a crisis that has led millions of Venezuelans to seek ref-
uge abroad. Within this scenario, the former regional powerhouse is now
facing low production of fiction and facing a recession of its IT depart-
ment (Obitel, 2017). Venezuela has eight private national networks chan-
nels and seven public network channels, which includes the international
channel Telesur, aimed at other Latin American countries (Obitel, 2017).
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Experimentalisms in Practice ; Music Perspectives from

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More information about this series at

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doctorate at University of Texas, is now teaching at Schreiner College near

2 The Growth of Latin American Television 13

3 Why Latin American Audiences Stay Loyal to National

4 The Persistence of the Popularity of US Television 87

5 Changing Class Formations and Changing Television

The Bust Years: 2014–2019 150

6 Streaming Television, Netflix, and Transverse

7 Netflix, Distinction, and Cosmopolitanism Among Latin

Fig. 2.1 Multichannel penetration by country in Argentina, Brazil,

Fig. 6.1 OTT players with the most users 172

Table 2.1 An overview of trends across times and spaces in Latin

Industries and Genres

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

(2013), by both national and foreign advertisers (Mattos, 1984), and by

imperialism, and national governments’ push to produce more, in a form

Identities and Audiences

excluded by emphasizing music that came from Afro-Brazilian traditions

Ongoing Appeal of U.S. Programming

Although national programming increasingly filled up most of the most

The Streaming Television Revolution

Latin American television. First is a renewed wave of unbalanced flow or

Theorizing the Audiences for Foreign Television

Outline of the Rest of the Book

prime driver of multichannel TV, a service formerly considered as a luxury

Beltran, L. R. (1978). TV etchings in the minds of Latin Americans: Conservatism,

Roncagliolo, R. (1995). Trade integration and communication networks in Latin

The Growth of Latin American Television

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

1977); a related idea of political patrimonialism that looks at the extension

Semiotics has often been applied to television and cultural studies

A related focus is the relationship between national governments and

Latin America: A Birthplace of International

prefer imports from other Latin American countries, especially in prime

right moment to change their programming and massify their audience,

Television Eras in Latin America

By the 1970s, television was more widely available in most Latin

Putting Latin America in the Context of the Other

A Region of Broadcast Exporters and Importers

operated for 20 years before going national, reached 46 million viewers

of broadcast TV in Argentina, along with the obstacles posed by the coun-

to the increasing international viewership of Colombian television (Piñon,

For most of the history of Venezuelan broadcasting, two family-­

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2 The Growth of Latin American Television 13

3 Why Latin American Audiences Stay Loyal to National

4 The Persistence of the Popularity of US Television 87

5 Changing Class Formations and Changing Television

The Bust Years: 2014–2019 150

6 Streaming Television, Netflix, and Transverse

7 Netflix, Distinction, and Cosmopolitanism Among Latin

Fig. 6.1 OTT players with the most users 172

For most of the history of Venezuelan broadcasting, two family-