Univisión

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Univisión is one of the largest Spanish language television channels in the United States.

Initially founded by the largest media company in Mexico (now known as Grupo Televisa) as a means to spread Spanish programming in the United States, Univision (orginally named "Spanish International Network" or SIN) has grown to be the largest Spanish-language media outlet in the U.S. Its daily news program Noticiero Univisión, co-anchored by Jorge Ramos and María Elena Salinas, has in several occasions outdone (in number of ratings) major English-language network evening news programming such as CBS, NBC, and ABC's World News Tonight.

Although Grupo Televisa still owns a large stake in Univision stock holding's, Grupo Cisneros of Venezuela purchased a large amount of shares becoming its largest shareholder.

Univisión and Telemundo USA have been competing for the top spot among Hispanic viewers for many years, often imitating each other's programming.

Univisión however has constantly maintained a lead in ratings due in large part to Mexican telenovelas, or soap operas, and other programming produced by Grupo Televisa. Telemundo has recently grown more competitive with Brazilian and Colombian telenovelas and also in large part because NBC has equipped the network since it acquired it.

Univisión headquarters are based in Los Angeles, although much of its programming is filmed in Miami where the first telenovelas produced by Univision have been filmed. Among its shows are El Show De Cristina (a talk show conducted by Cristina Saralegui), Don Francisco's Sábado Gigante, Despierta América (morning show), Primer Impacto (newsmagazine), Aquí y Ahora (premier investigative nightly news magazine), and, as mentioned above, Noticiero Univisión. In addition to that, Univisión has for years shown live boxing fights and soccer matches, and also the World Cup. Univisión has an annual award ceremony (Premios Lo Nuestro to honor latin musicians and actors.

Univision has contracts with Mexico's Televisa and Venezuela's Venevisión to showcase some of their novelas and tv shows, such as the annual Miss Venezuela and Nuestra Belleza Mexico contests that elect the representative of this countries to the Miss Universe pageant, and in 2001 it acquired Puerto Rico's WLII-TV (former Tele Once) and WSTE-TV (former Super Siete, now a TeleFutura affiliate).

See also: List of United States television networks