TelevisaUnivision Reports Full-Year Streaming Profit, U.S. Ad Revenue Grows on Sports, Political
The company, led by CEO Daniel Alegre, said that its streaming business with its flagship service ViX posted another profit in the fourth quarter of 2024 after achieving profitability in the third quarter 'after just two full years in the marketplace.' After having ended 2023 with more than 7 million subscribers and $700 million in annual revenue, 'the direct-to-consumer (DTC) business generated $1 billion in revenue and positive adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA) in ViX's second full year of operation,' the company highlighted on Thursday.
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José Luis Fabila is now leading all content globally for the company as part of an Alegre-overseen reorganization and reduction of its workforce by a mid- to high-single-digit percentage, which was unveiled late last year. TelevisaUnivision disclosed restructuring, severance and related charges of $53.4 million for the fourth quarter, compared with $24.2 million in the year-ago period. For the full year 2024, these charges amounted to $72.9 million, compared with $53.4 million in 2023.
Revenue in the fourth quarter declined 1 percent, but grew 4 percent when excluding foreign-exchange impacts, to $1.3 billion, with the U.S. growth outweighed by a 5 percent drop in Mexico, which amounted to an 8 percent gain when excluding currency impacts. Operating expenses were 'essentially flat' at $892 million. The firm's quarterly loss narrowed to $809.7 million from $912.1 million in the year-ago period.
TelevisaUnivision's quarterly adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA), another key profitability metric, declined 3 percent to $451.9 million in the fourth quarter, or grew 3 percent when excluding currency impacts.
The company also disclosed a quarterly charge for the impairment of program rights of $142.5 million for the fourth quarter of 2023 and $157.1 million for the full year. It also posted an impairment loss of $900.2 million for the full year 2024, compared with $1.01 billion in 2023. Both impairment charges are non-cash charges recorded as a result of regular testing of the company's assets and do not impact its OIBDA, leverage or cash position.
Advertising revenue fell 1 percent in the final quarter of 2024 to $851 million as the U.S. gain to $475.6 million was outweighed by a 4 percent drop in Mexico. Excluding the impact of foreign exchange rates, Mexico advertising revenue grew 10 percent.
Full-year 2024 U.S. advertising revenue growth 'accelerated to 2 percent, driven by a record-breaking year in sports and political advertising demand garnering $70 million,' the firm said.
'2024 was a year of continued momentum for TelevisaUnivision, and my early days at the helm have reinforced the tremendous opportunity ahead of us,' said Alegre, the former president and COO of Activision Blizzard and CEO of Yuga Labs who took over as TelevisaUnivision CEO in September: 'The recent U.S. election cycle underscored the power and influence TelevisaUnivision has to deliver the Hispanic vote through our reach and connection with the community.'
He added: 'With our newly unified organizational structure, we are fully harnessing the strengths of Univision in the U.S. and Televisa in Mexico to drive further connectivity and expand our impact as a global content leader.'
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New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
Why the Bundesliga has turned to Mark Goldbridge and YouTube to grow its audience
The Bundesliga's new roster of UK broadcasters will certainly draw comment. This morning, The Athletic revealed that the Deutsche Fussball Liga (DFL) has struck a new agreement with the BBC, Amazon Prime and its existing broadcast partner Sky Sports — but that YouTube channels The Overlap and That's Entertainment, hosted by the online personality Mark Goldbridge, will also be showing 20 live games this season, starting with Bayern Munich's match against RB Leipzig on Friday night. Advertisement Sky will continue to show the Saturday night game, which is often the biggest of the round, and Amazon has exclusive rights to the Sunday afternoon matches. But Friday evenings will see the start of a new, free-to-air approach, where the BBC and the two YouTube channels, alongside the Bundesliga's official channel, will share non-exclusive rights to the opening fixture of the weekend. The aim is straightforward: to get as many people engaging with German football as possible. But understanding the Bundesliga's approach — and why it has been willing to entrust YouTube channels with no experience of broadcasting live matches — requires perspective. In December 2024, the DFL, which operates the two Bundesliga divisions, signed a lucrative domestic broadcasting contract worth €1.3billion (£1.2bn; $1.5bn at current rates) per season for the next four years, a two per cent increase on the previous deal, which ranked it second among the top five European leagues (behind the Premier League). However, increasing the value of the Bundesliga's foreign broadcasting rights has been a long-standing challenge. While the Premier League earns €1.69bn per season from the sale of its broadcasting rights overseas, the equivalent packages are worth €983m for La Liga, €406.7m for Serie A and just €263m per season for the Bundesliga. The objective is not to catch the Premier League or battle its financial primacy. Neither is a realistic aim because of the same restraints that explain why the DFL has been willing to take such a bold step. With a few exceptions, the DFL's member clubs are governed by what is known as the 50+1 rule. Until 1998, private ownership of German teams was prohibited, but with the increasing wealth of leagues across Europe during that decade, that old ethos became incompatible with the desire to be competitive in the Champions League. Advertisement The compromise was the 50+1 rule. It mandated that football clubs could become public limited companies separate from their original member-run organisations, many of which played multiple sports, but only on the condition that majority control (literally, 50 per cent of shares, plus one) remained with the members. For instance, while Audi, Allianz and Adidas each own a 8.33 per cent share in Bayern Munich, the football club, the remaining 75 per cent are in the hands of paying club members. The effect of 50+1 was to make clubs accountable to their members and preserve and protect many of the virtues that German football is known for. Ticket prices are low. Atmospheres are buoyant. Stadiums have a distinctly regional feel. The compromise, if that is the right word, is that it prevents the wholesale investment that has transformed English football and attracted battalions of marketable stars and commercial partners by the dozen. Endowing fans with such agency — effectively making board members answerable to supporters — can also have a limiting effect commercially. In February 2024, for instance, the DFL was forced to abandon its plans to negotiate a €1bn investment deal with a private equity firm after widespread, sustained protests by fans disrupted weeks of fixtures. That power also makes hosting Bundesliga games abroad a practical impossibility. Such a move would never be tolerated or accepted by a footballing environment that remains deeply suspicious of commercialism and militantly on guard against any move in that direction. So, while La Liga is moving closer to hosting a game in Miami and Italy and Spain have already exported their Super Cups to the Middle East, the Bundesliga must remain strictly domestic. Its pursuit of foreign markets can never include staging a game outside Germany. It drastically narrows the avenues for growth. Without the star power of the Premier League or the capacity to export the authentic product — a competitive game — the DFL, on behalf of its clubs and with the aim of growing its appeal to foreign broadcasters, must be more creative. And that is the lens through which to view this new broadcasting agreement. Appearing on the BBC and Sky Sports provides prestige and reach to traditional viewers, while the YouTube streams could attract new followers across a medium that younger generations are more likely to use, but that itself caters to different types of fans, with contrasting interests and habits. Advertisement It could be divisive and in some quarters, it will be unpopular. The hope, though, is that momentum acquired with those new channels can be translated into future growth and more valuable broadcasting contracts down the line. For now, that remains an uncertain equation and an optimistic view on where this might lead, but it is a creative approach to a growth problem for which there is no obvious answer. (Top photos: Bayern Munich striker Harry Kane and Mark Goldbridge; Getty Images) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
New BBC thriller The Guest celebrates women 'being messy, angry and ugly'
Eve Myles and Gabrielle Creevy tell Yahoo UK about the BBC thriller's realistic depiction of women, and why a lot of women portrayed in TV are unrecognisable. Women, more often than not, aren't given the space to be messy onscreen, that's why BBC series The Guest deserves to be a cause for celebration, co-stars Eve Myles and Gabrielle Creevy tell Yahoo UK. Myles admits she hardly recognises the women portrayed in TV and film because they aren't representative of real life, but The Guest hopes to change that. The four-part series follows cleaner Ria (Creevy) who is taken under the wing by her wealthy employer Fran (Myles), who is captivating and unapologetic in equal measure. Fran is a woman who does what she wants and encourages others, like Ria, to do the same instead of limiting themselves to what society expects of them. As an intense friendship grows between them things take a dark turn, Ria becomes embroiled in a psychological game where nothing is as it seems and she must question everything and everyone, including her new employer. "It's great to see women, and play women, and celebrate their flaws and to celebrate what is deemed to be unfeminine, whatever the hell that means," Myles admits. "It's about voice, it's about presence, it's about being seen and being heard. It's about opinions, it's about friendship and love. "And, playing these types of women, it's about how the most unlikely of relationships can spark up because they need each other. They need something from each other, and yet in needing something from each other, what do they take from each other and never get back? "[We're] playing women that we recognise certain elements of and truly understand, because there are a lot of women on television who are played and I don't recognise them, I don't understand them, I don't see them. 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It was the strength of the characters and the writing on the page that the actors fell in love with, with the pair sharing how easy it was for them to join a project like The Guest. Creevey admits that when she received the script, she "couldn't stop turning the pages" because of how absorbed she became by the story's twists and surprises. She adds, "I just love a thriller like I love a Netflix thriller, so that's it for me." Myles first experienced The Guest under unique circumstances: "about 40 minutes before" she was set to take her daughters to see Taylor Swift in concert in Cardiff. "I had glitter all on one eye and the Taylor Swift shirt's on with all out hair like Taylor Swift, and my kids are all excited and Taylor Swift was playing in the kitchen and everything," she says, but the prospect of reading the first script by Matthew Barry was so enticing she couldn't help but keep thinking about it all the way through the show. "I'm like, this is an incredibly special scene, there's a very strong chemistry, I need to read the script, but we need to see Taylor Swift. I went to Taylor Swift and all I thought about — and Taylor Swift don't get me wrong, was incredible, — but all I could think of, my entire brain was going 'The Guest, The Guest, The Guest'. I've got to get back and read this. "So we go home and put my children in bed and read it, and I knew I was doing it before we'd had any conversations. It was intoxicating and intriguing and different and challenging. And I needed to do it." With such a strong connection to Taylor Swift in Myles' mind, Yahoo can't help but ask what song she'd choose from the pop star to describe The Guest. Her answer, perhaps unsurprisingly given the nature of the psychological thriller genre, was Look What You Made Me Do. With a show of this nature, it was important that the actors supported each other through it, but luckily, the stars became fast friends on set. It was an example of an instant connection that helped enhance the performance and take it further than they thought. Creevy explains: "We just kind of clicked, and that lent itself really into the show. We had conversations, but it's tricky because they're very complicated women, and it's a complicated relationship, but they were never really conversations that were like scene by scene; we didn't really talk in detail about it, we kind of just went with it. "Even before I met Eve, I knew I was going to trust her, like I've seen her work and I'm a fan, and I know I can trust her. Every take was really exciting, and that's what you want, really, when you're working with someone. Especially with a thriller, you want to be on your toes, and that's what it kind of felt like." Myles adds that they had a fine balancing act of embodying their characters while also not giving too much away to the audience too early: "With a thriller, you can only, and you should only, play what's on the page. 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Myles concurs, as she adds: "I think they can absolutely expect the unexpected, but really enjoy the journey on the way and be surprised and shocked. And I would hope that the viewers who watch this have a different, or some, understanding of both of these women that wasn't there at the beginning but do definitely have at the end." The Guest premieres on BBC One this Autumn.
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
YouTuber Mark Goldbridge among Bundesliga's UK broadcast partners for this season
The Bundesliga has become the first major European football league to award part of its live broadcasting rights in the United Kingdom to a content creator, with That's Football — a channel hosted by the online personality Mark Goldbridge — to show matches this season. The new agreement is due to be announced today and is expected to be in place for the Bundesliga's first round of games this weekend, starting with Friday night's clash between defending champions Bayern Munich and RB Leipzig at Allianz Arena. Advertisement That game — and all other Friday night fixtures for the next two seasons — will be shown live on the BBC, on both the website and the iPlayer. The Overlap, a British-based YouTube channel with 1.5m subscribers, and Goldbridge's That's Football, which boasts a further 1.38m subscribers, will share those rights, showing 20 live Friday night games in 2025-26 in watch-along formats. All games will be free-to-air. In addition, the Bundesliga's own YouTube channel will be broadcasting all Friday night games in the Bundesliga and the second tier of German football, as live. In August 2025, The Rest is Football, part of the Goalhanger stable of podcasts, became the first UK platform of its kind to secure a highlights package, when it agreed to a three-year deal with La Liga. The Bundesliga's agreement, however, is for a full live broadcast and step further away from traditional broadcasting models. nobody cared who i was until i put on the ball holder — That's Football! (@ThatsFootballTV) August 16, 2025 Sky Sports has been the Bundesliga's long-term partner in the UK. Its most recent agreement was signed in 2021 and included exclusive rights for the last four seasons. That deal has now ended, but Sky will retain the rights to the Saturday evening game in Germany, which will include the clashes between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund later in the season. In a further change, Amazon has acquired the exclusive rights to all of the Bundesliga's Sunday fixtures, which will be available on a pay-per-view basis, adding to a sports portfolio in the UK which includes three Ligue 1 matches per week and one Champions League fixture per round. But it will be the involvement of the content creators that draws the most attention. The Overlap regularly features ex-players Gary Neville, Roy Keane and Jamie Carragher, as well as debates between fans of Premier League clubs, but has never been a rights holder before. Similarly, while That's Football's growth has depended on its watch-along format, this will be the first time the channel has featured live footage from a major league. Advertisement Sources close to the deal, who have been granted anonymity to protect relationships, have told The Athletic that the agreement for both channels will run until the end of the current season. Neither The Overlap nor Mark Goldbridge responded to The Athletic's requests for comment. By Dan Sheldon Mark Goldbridge, whose real name is Brent Di Cesare, is arguably one of the biggest personalities on YouTube when it comes to football content. Having gained popularity via his Manchester United-specific channel, The United Stand, which has more than two million subscribers on YouTube, Goldbridge has built a significant following globally. Although Goldbridge, 46, is a polarising figure and he has as many detractors as he does supporters, the Bundesliga wanting to utilise his platform shouldn't come as a huge surprise. That's Football, which is another of Goldbridge's YouTube channels, has amassed nearly 1.4million subscribers and, unlike his Manchester United show, focuses more generally on a wide range of football topics. His last six videos uploaded have been watched more by more than a combined 1.5m people, so the Bundesliga has obviously seen the value in wanting to get their product in as front of as many eyes as possible. And given Goldbridge has a global reach, coupled with how the current discourse suggests that younger audiences are turning to YouTube for their content, it is a deal that will suit both parties. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle
