Radio Centro Fails to Make Required Payment, Loses Mexico TV License

 

PUERTO VALLARTA – Grupo Radio Centro, one of two recent winners of nationwide, free-to-air digital TV channels in Mexico, has failed to make a required payment for its 20-year concession, the company said in a filing with the Mexican Stock Exchange.

The group “did not make the payment stemming from the awarding of an over-the-air broadcast license; it therefore will cover the (bid security deposit) through previously contemplated liquidity operations,” Friday’s filing read.

The telecommunications regulator, known as the IFT, had set a Friday deadline for Radio Centro to make the payment.

The IFT said after Radio Centro’s announcement that the company had forfeited its concession by not complying with its payment obligations.

The regulator also said it will claim the company’s 415-million-peso (some $27.3-million) bid security deposit and will soon analyze its next steps related to the frequency bands that once again have become available.

The IFT announced March 11 that Grupo Radio Centro and Cadena Tres were awarded licenses for the two channels in a process aimed at ending the duopoly of Mexico’s No. 1 broadcaster Televisa and smaller rival TV Azteca.

Radio Centro bid 3 billion pesos ($201.2 million) and Cadena Tres 1.8 billion pesos ($118.9 million), while both offered to provide service to 106 million inhabitants, or roughly 94 percent of the population.

The bid process was part of a broadcast TV overhaul aimed at opening up a sector dominated by Televisa and TV Azteca, which together control nearly all of Mexico’s broadcast television market.

The IFT was created as part of that same overhaul, which was proposed by President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration and approved in 2013.

The overhaul established, among other things, that dominant operators in any sector will be subject to asymmetric regulation to avoid market distortion.

Televisa was declared a dominant operator in the broadcast television industry in March 2014.