Programadora

In Colombian broadcasting, a programadora (literally programmer) is a company that produces television programs, especially for the public-commercial Canal Uno (and, until 2003, Canal A/Segunda Cadena).

The Colombian television model from 1955 to the late 1990s, known as the sistema mixto ("mixed system"), relied on programadoras as the sole producers of programs that aired on the two major channels. Following the introduction of two national private television channels to the country in the late 1990s, the recession of that same time period and a resulting combination of falling ratings and declining advertising revenues, the programadoras went into a tailspin that led to many closing in bankruptcy or becoming production companies for the private networks. By 2003, only seven programadoras were left on Canal Uno; there are currently four.

History

1950s-70s

In 1955, the Colombian government created what would be the model of national television for the next four decades. For the preceding year, the lone national channel had focused exclusively on educational and cultural programs. However, a fall in the world price of coffee, the country's principal export, forced the government to cut the portion of its budget allotted to television.[1]

Private companies bid to lease timeslots to air their shows on the Cadena Nacional (National Channel), which was the only TV network in the country. The government, in turn (from 1964, through Inravisión, the state broadcaster), chose the timeslots and the programs they should air, and operated the national television infrastructure. The first of the major production companies began to spring up, such as Producciones PUNCH (the first programadora, founded in 1956) and RTI Colombia. Radio networks RCN (in 1967) and Caracol (in 1963) also entered the new medium of television; their initial joint effort, a programadora known as TVC, briefly held a contract to program as much as 50% of the broadcast day, but did not meet with success.[2][1] When Colombia gained a second national channel in 1972, Segunda Cadena, companies were assigned slots on both channels indiscriminately, and the mixed system began its 26-year reign as the undisputed model of commercial television in Colombia.

The licitación

Every several years—often in every government—bidding cycles known as licitaciones were opened. At these times, new potential programadoras would bid, old ones would compete for new positions, and some would leave the air. At the start of the next calendar year, television schedules completely changed. These bidding cycles occurred in 1972, 1975, 1977, 1981, 1983, 1987, 1991 (see below), and 1997. (Note the varied length of the concessions: three years in the 1970s, two years in the early 1980s, four years in the mid-late 1980s, and six years after the passage of the Colombian Constitution of 1991.) There was also a small licitación in 1991 to award the former slots of Promec Televisión and Jorge Enrique Pulido TV; a larger off-cycle licitación in 1996 that awarded the former slots of Producciones Cinevisión[3] and one in 2000 that awarded spaces returned by programadoras including TeVecine and DFL Televisión.[4]

Newscasts were particularly affected by these bidding periods, being particular points of pressure from political parties. New ones would appear after licitaciones and old ones might disappear (such as QAP after 1997) or move to new time slots (for instance, Datos y Mensajes and its flagship Noticiero TV Hoy wound up moving from weekdays to weekends in 1992; the Noticiero 24 Horas in 1998 found itself moving from its traditional 7pm time to 12:30pm). Newscasts either ran on weekdays or on weekends and holidays. At some licitaciones (such as 1991), those wishing to bid for a newscast could not bid for any other programming. The pressure for equal political representation made the production of newscasts among the most coveted and scrutinized elements of the mixed system. For instance, the 1983 round of concessions awarded six spaces for newscasts, three of them to conservative interests and three to liberals.[5]

Most programadoras that disappeared prior to the programadoras crisis did so at the end of one of those calendar years (for instance, Noticiero Criptón, a programadora that produced the newscast by the same name, left the air at the end of 1997). There were several exceptions: Jorge Enrique Pulido TV ceased operations in 1990 after its proprietor died, and Multimedia Televisión; Promec Televisión;[6] and Cromavisión[7] were forced out for nonpayment of debt (after caducidad administrativa, or administrative expiration of the contracts these companies had with Inravisión, was declared).

Separate bidding cycles were held to program holidays (festivos), usually with movies and special programs. Promec and Producciones Eduardo Lemaitre, later to be known as CPT, were pioneers in this venue of programming. CPT was sold in 1988, did not bid in 1991, and returned at the start of 1998.

In the 1980s, OTI Colombia, a consortium of programadoras that had the license to broadcast the Olympic Games and World Cup, was formed. It included such major names as R.T.I., Caracol, RCN, PUNCH, Producciones JES and Datos y Mensajes.

1991 changes

The Colombian Constitution of 1991 precipitated major changes in the way the licensing was handled. 31 programadoras applied, and 24 won. These 24 were split into two groups of 12, originally dubbed Telenorte and Telesur, that would air their programs on competing channels. There were several other major changes:[8]

There were a variety of issues that accompanied the new bidding cycle:

In March 1993, more ratings information came to Colombian screens. A court decision forced Inravisión to ban sexual and violent scenes from the franja familiar (family block). Programadoras were now required to state if the program was appropriate for minors to view.[12] In addition, programadoras had to submit their material to Inravisión 72 hours in advance to determine its suitability.

One additional programadora would vanish in 1995-96, Producciones Cinevisión, on account of its internal problems. The spaces were returned to the CNTV.

Privatization, recession and crisis

Ratings share for Colombian TV channels 1998-2003.[13] Note the shrinkage of the green and yellow spaces belonging to Canal A and Canal Uno and corresponding growth of RCN (red) and Caracol (blue). Source: IBOPE

In 1997, Colómbia awarded two private television licenses to Caracol and RCN, two of the largest programadoras; their channels took to the air on July 10, 1998. Some 25 programadoras still applied for spaces on the two channels in the licitación of 1997, however, including Caracol and RCN which had limited spaces on the two major channels from January–July 1998.[14] However, Caracol and RCN enjoyed limited output; notably, Caracol was left without any timeslots on Saturdays. Other programadoras presented Caracol's marquee programs on that day, the Premier Caracol movie (Andes Televisión and the revived CPT) and the long-running Sábados Felices variety show (Coestrellas/CPS/Proyectamos Televisión).

Understanding that more unity was needed within each channel against the new competition, programadoras began to find ways to cooperate. The twelve Canal A companies formed the Canal A Society, within which each of the programadoras acquired a program specialty. For instance, RTI produced novelas and large-scale game shows, while En Vivo was placed in charge of developing a channel-wide news service.[15] They also contracted one agency, Mejía y Asociados, to market advertising for the entire channel, while they began selling and buying programs as a single group on the international market. There was significantly less cooperation on Canal Uno, where companies operated in a much more independent manner, though several groups of companies began creating common advertising firms.[16]

It was known at the time that the public-commercial Inravisión channels would be affected, but nobody predicted it would be as rapid a change as it was. In the first year of the private channels, they were growing at the rate anticipated for their fifth year of broadcasting.

The timing was exceedingly poor. Along with the decreases in advertising revenue related to the Colombian recession of the late 1990s,[17] many of the major advertisers, linked to the economic groups that controlled Caracol and RCN, pulled their advertising budgets from the mixed system.[18] To survive financially, many companies turned to televentas, or infomercials, but those caused viewers to flee Canal Uno and Canal A, as did the increased programming flexibility enjoyed by the new private channels. The crisis was on.

By 1999, the programadoras had asked for six of the eighteen daily hours of programming to be removed and for license costs to be lowered; their collective deficits had reached 100 billion Colombian pesos (about US$53 million)[19][20] and by 2001, their combined debts would exceed 26 billion pesos (about US$11.3 million).[20][21] Colombiana de Televisión saw itself forced to sell its star program, Padres e Hijos, to competitor Caracol in order to stay afloat.[17]

The year 2000 saw several important programadoras leave the air: TeVecine,[22] DFL Televisión, PUNCH,[23] JES[24] and Cenpro Televisión[25] all returned their spaces to the CNTV. As the spaces came in, Audiovisuales, the state programadora, saw a sharp and unexpected increase in its output — from a mere 5.5 hours at the start of 1998[26] to a whopping 41 hours a week after PUNCH's departure.[23] Many of these programs were repeats, which led to further ratings declines.[18] Companies like JES went from being programadoras to program producers for the private networks.

By March 2001, six companies had fallen under Ley 550, the bankruptcy reorganization law then in force in Colombia; this number rose to seven by July.[27][28] Later in the year, En Vivo, which produced the weeknight 9:30pm newscasts on Canal A, made the decision to cease operations for reasons that included nonpayment of salaries of reporters and a debt of 14 billion Colombian pesos (over US$6 million).[20][29] Less than ten programadoras were left by August 2001.[30] Some companies continued to work together, such as a partnership on Canal A that included Coestrellas, Datos y Mensajes and two other programadoras,[31] but that flopped so badly that Datos y Mensajes' flagship news program, Noticiero TV Hoy, was off the air by the end of 2001.

"A dying lion"

The situation continued to worsen, and one channel was affected more than the other: while early on it had a ratings advantage over its public competitor, Canal A began to experience serious issues. One week in March, Noticiero Hora Cero, the last news program on the channel,[32] and its producer CPS went off the air for lack of money, its news director calling the action a sign of the sure death of that channel;[33] the next, Andes Televisión and Proyectamos Televisión turned in their slots and called it quits due to the CNTV banning infomercials and depriving the companies of vital revenues.[34] The rapidly deteriorating situation prompted the El Tiempo newspaper to dub the channel "a dying lion", a riff on its long-standing lion-themed idents. Coestrellas's mid-2003 liquidation left just one programadora on the Canal A side standing, RTI. As part of a salvation plan (Plan de Salvamento) approved by the government on June 19, 2003, RTI was moved to Canal Uno.[19] After several months of showing nothing but programs from Audiovisuales, the state programadora (an arm of the Ministerio de Comunicaciones), on October 24, 2003, Canal A became the government-controlled Señal Institucional.[35]

Inravisión and Audiovisuales were liquidated in 2004, partly due to the programadoras crisis but also due to out-of-date equipment and, in the case of the former, costly pension liabilities. Inravisión was replaced by RTVC (Radio Televisión Nacional de Colombia), now known as RTVC Sistema de Medios Públicos.

After the apocalypse

The salvation plan of 2003 and the licitación of the same year resulted in a dramatic realignment of the survivors on Canal Uno. Of the seven remnants, six were grouped into time-sharing cooperatives: Jorge Barón Televisión with newcomer Sportsat, NTC with Colombiana de Televisión and RTI with Programar Televisión, along with CM&. Each of the four groups received 25% of Canal Uno's airtime, including the production of a newscast for each group.[19]

The original length of these contracts was 10 years beginning January 1, 2014, but all except the RTI/Programar contract, which the companies opted to not renew, were extended in September 2013 by the Autoridad Nacional de Televisión (ANTV), successor of the CNTV, to an expiration date of April 30, 2017. RTVC Sistema de Medios Públicos, along with Jorge Barón/Sportsat, NTC/Coltevisión and CM&, currently program Canal Uno.[36]

Critical reception

Several television figures in Colombia have posthumously mourned the loss of the mixed system, noting that it was one of the reasons that television in Colombia developed to be stronger than that of its Latin American peers and that privatization, as happened with the launch of Caracol and RCN, killed off many positive qualities of Colombia's television industry. In a 2004 retrospective on 50 years of television in Colombia, Iván McAllister, then the president of Citytv Bogotá, noted: "The broadcast concessionaires knew what to abide by. There was a healthy market and a growing demand that allowed them to develop and consolidate themselves as television companies. That went away quickly with the new TV."[18] Daisy Cañón noted in 2003 that the privatization of Colombian television caused it to step back from a pluralism perspective, as the ability of Caracol and RCN to attract viewers and ratings causes high-quality cultural and other programs to be missed.[1] Paula Arenas, former head of Producciones Cinevisión, noted as part of Señal Colombia's series covering the 60th anniversary of television in Colombia that privatization caused television "as a creative exercise" to become a loss-making proposal[37] and also that more recent Colombian television programs are more focused and formulaic.

Those that support privatization note that it made television much more responsive to viewer demand and increased the role of market forces in the Colombian television industry.[38]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Sandra Liliana Vecino Valero and Isabel Cristina Muñoz Betancur. "Yo soy Betty, la fea: Análisis de un producto televisivo." Thesis, Universidad de La Sabana, 2003. link
  2. "El nacimiento de las industrias culturales", Revista Credencial April 2012:
  3. "CNTV asignó espacios en Canal Uno." El Tiempo 5 March 1996: link
  4. "Abren nueva licitación en camales [sic] privados." El Tiempo 6 June 2000: link
  5. Vizcaíno, Milciades. "La legislación de televisión en Colombia: entre el Estado y el mercado." Historia Crítica" 28 (July 2004): 87-103.
  6. "Promec saldría de la televisión." El Tiempo 26 January 1991
  7. "Cromavisión saldría de la televisión. El Tiempo 5 September 1991:link
  8. (Spanish) Duque Salazar, Ana Lucia. "TV 92: Se oyen las propuestas." El Tiempo 19 August 1991:
  9. "La mala hora de la programadora Audiovisuales." El Tiempo 23 October 1997: link
  10. "Arranca la Comisión Nacional de Televisión." El Tiempo 13 June 1995: link
  11. "Siguen demandas contra la licitación de television." El Tiempo 7 August 1991: link
  12. "Programas de TV siguen en el aire." El Tiempo 31 March 1993: link
  13. (Now a dead link. Information is saved on the talk page.)
  14. Luz Monroy, Martha. "Las sobrevivientes." El Tiempo 15 July 2003: link (Spanish)
  15. León Giraldo, Diego. "El Canal A se lanza a la guerra." El Tiempo 26 July 1998: link
  16. "Los doce contra el león del A." El Tiempo 19 Nov. 1998: link
  17. 1 2 "Sin sintonía, el negocio de la TV", El Tiempo 10 Feb. 2000: link
  18. 1 2 3 "El año de la ruptura: 1998." El Tiempo 11 June 2004: link
  19. 1 2 3 "50 Años de la Televisión", El Tiempo 11 May 2004: link
  20. 1 2 3 Value of Colombian peso converted to US dollars: 1999 2001
  21. "Crecen las deudas de las programadoras de TV." El Tiempo 8 June 2001: link
  22. "Programadora Tevecine se va por la producción." El Tiempo 2 March 2000: link
  23. 1 2 Yances, Germán. "PUNCH, no va más". El Tiempo 28 May 2000: link
  24. "JES entregará sus espacios de TV. El Tiempo 13 September 2000: link
  25. "Cenpro no va más". El Tiempo 29 September 2000: link
  26. Sandoval, Carlos. "Audiovisuales se quedó sin aire." El Tiempo 21 August 1998: link
  27. "Programadoras en crisis." El Tiempo 23 March 2001: link (Spanish)
  28. "Más empresas se acogen a Ley 550. El Tiempo 17 July 2001: link
  29. Luz Monroy, Martha. "Murió En Vivo." El Tiempo 15 June 2001: link
  30. "Televisión pública sigue perdiendo." El Tiempo 22 August 2001: link
  31. "El despertar del león." El Tiempo 7 July 2001: link
  32. "Se acabó Hora Cero." El Tiempo 17 March 2003: link
  33. "Las medidas nos llegaron tarde." El Tiempo 18 March 2003: link
  34. Luz Monroy, Martha. "Canal A, un león que agoniza." El Tiempo 26 March 2003: link (Spanish)
  35. Luz Monroy, Martha. "Adiós león, hola condor." El Tiempo 22 Oct. 2003: link
  36. "Amplían por 40 meses concesiones a tres operadores de Canal Uno", El Tiempo 13 September 2013: link
  37. Señal Colombia Sistema de Medios Públicos, "Del sistema mixto a la privatización", Todo Lo Que Vimos (2014): link
  38. Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia, Impacto económico de las industrias culturales en Colombia. Bogotá: Convenio Andrés Bello, 2003
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