About Xama TV

Xama TV

Xama TV is the university television channel of the Universidad Nacional de San Juan, in the city of San Juan, Argentina, and is described by the university as the first public channel of the province of San Juan. It began online transmissions in 2015 and joined open digital terrestrial television on channel 33.1 on 25 October 2017. Its origins lie in CREACOM, the university's centre for audiovisual creation founded in 1986, which produced university content for three decades before the channel existed. Xama is therefore both one of the youngest channels in this batch and one with a long documented prehistory, and its creation is a direct product of Argentina's 2009 Audiovisual Communication Services Law, which opened television licences to national universities. It broadcasts from San Juan, is also carried on local cable systems, streams live through its website xama.tv and its YouTube channel, and celebrated its eighth anniversary on digital air in October 2025.

Origins in CREACOM, 1986

The origin of Xama TV is the CREACOM, the Centro de Creación para los Medios de Comunicación, also referred to in university sources as the Centro de Creación para Medios de Comunicación Masiva, created at the Universidad Nacional de San Juan in 1986. For thirty years CREACOM functioned as the university's audiovisual production centre, and its materials form the archive from which the later channel drew. University communication secretary Mariela Miranda described the relationship at the channel's formal creation by saying that the university used daily the materials made by CREACOM, that its archive materials came from there, and that the channel was the logical succession and healthy evolution of what was born as a university production company and then evolved into a channel. Director Gastón Alcayaga, who led the channel for a period and had been part of the university for twenty years since joining CREACOM, tells the same institutional story from inside: a production centre that became a channel because Argentine law and university policy finally allowed it to broadcast in its own right.

The legal opening for university television

Xama's consolidation as a public channel was made possible by the Ley de Servicios de Comunicación Audiovisual, the Audiovisual Communication Services Law, which allowed universities to have their own radio and television signals and strengthened democratic communication across the country, as the university itself states in its anniversary history. Vice-rector Mónica Coca noted at the channel's formal creation that university channels were authorised for some universities in the national public system and that the Universidad Nacional de San Juan was one of them because of the history of CREACOM and its nationally recognised production record. She also noted candidly that the channel had been generated and conceived by a public policy but that, with the change of national government, it did not have the resources it had been told it would have for content generation. That tension, between a legal right to broadcast and uncertain funding to produce, has defined the Argentine university television sector generally and Xama's own history in particular.

Online launch in 2015 and digital air in 2017

Xama's transmissions began in 2015 through the internet. The date the university treats as its true birth on air is 25 October 2017, when its signal was broadcast for the first time on open digital terrestrial television, TDA, on channel 33.1. The inauguration act that day took place at the Secretariat of Communications at Laprida 1130 Oeste in the city of San Juan, attended by the provincial vice-governor Marcelo Lima and governor Sergio Uñac, the rector of the university Oscar Nasisi, vice-rector Mónica Coca, the deans of the five faculties, the provincial education minister Felipe de los Ríos, provincial deputies, the provincial secretary of science and technology Tulio del Bono, communications secretary Mariela Miranda, institutional press director Susana Roldán, representatives of the Universidad Católica de Cuyo, teachers, students and guests. The presence of the provincial government at a university channel launch underlines the channel's public status: although it belongs to a national university, it was received in San Juan as the arrival of the province's first public television channel, in a province whose only open station since 1964 had been the private Canal 8.

Formal creation by the university council

Although the channel went on air on the TDA on 25 October 2017, its formal creation inside the university came afterwards, when the Consejo Superior, the university's superior council, unanimously created and regulated Xama TV, University Signal, within the university's Secretariat of Communication. Councillor Laura Garcés told the council she was a consumer of the channel and had replaced the national channels Encuentro and TV Pública with Xama, not only for what it showed of her own university but for the experiences of other universities it carried, praising the quality of the programmes she had seen. The sequence, broadcast first and formal constitution second, reflects how Argentine university channels were assembled in practice during the TDA rollout, with transmission infrastructure and programming running ahead of internal statutes. The channel's name is also rendered as Xama Señal UNSJ and Xama, the University Signal, in university usage.

Distribution

Since its TDA launch Xama has expanded its presence beyond channel 33.1. University sources list carriage on channel 18 of IO Total and channel 22 of Super Digital, with later accounts also recording incorporation into the Supercanal grid, and live availability through its website www.xama.tv and the YouTube channel Xama Señal UNSJ. The university relaunched the channel's website as a live streaming point and described it as the first stage of a future multimedia audiovisual platform and library containing all the content generated by the first public channel of the province of San Juan. For a university channel with a small production budget, that combination of one open digital frequency, two local cable positions and open internet streaming is the practical distribution model: it reaches households without cable in San Juan city through the TDA, cable subscribers through the local operators, and the university's own dispersed students and graduates through the web.

Programming and content sources

Xama's programming is made up in large part of its own local productions together with content from BACUA, the Banco Audiovisual de Contenidos Universales Argentino, and from RENAU, the Red Nacional Audiovisual Universitaria, the national university audiovisual network, as the university states in presenting the channel. That mix is the standard architecture of Argentine university television: locally made programmes about the university's teaching, research, extension and cultural life, filled out and given national breadth by the shared university network and the national universal content bank. The university presents the channel's output as a plural and inclusive signal. In its eighth anniversary reflection in October 2025, the university wrote that in eight years Xama TV had been much more than a television channel, a space of resistance and encounter where the word had been democratised and placed at the service of everyone, that each transmission and each voice on its screen testified to commitment to the right to communication as a fundamental human right, and that the channel had built bridges between the university and society. That language is the university's own self-description and is reported here as such.

Public mission in a one-channel province

Xama's significance in San Juan is structural. From 1964 until 2017 the province's open television consisted of a single private commercial station, Canal 8. Xama's arrival on the TDA gave San Juan a public, non-commercial open signal for the first time, owned not by the provincial government but by the national university, which gives it a different kind of public character: editorially anchored in an autonomous university rather than in the provincial executive. Reporting on university journalism in San Juan records director Gastón Alcayaga arguing that universities need and have the duty to communicate what they do, and acknowledging that university media are an easy target for budget adjustment and among the thinnest threads in a period of pressure on public media nationally, while maintaining that communication from the university can and must be done. The same reporting notes that Xama belongs to federal networks of similar media and has watched university and provincial channels elsewhere in Argentina disappear, with the university providing it a protective umbrella.

The Mónica Coca tribute and institutional memory

The university's anniversary history of the channel includes a formal tribute to Mónica Coca, the vice-rector who championed the channel at its creation, whose speeches at the launch and at the council session that constituted Xama are quoted in the university's records. That institutional memory matters to the channel's identity: Xama presents itself not as a commercial start-up but as the product of a specific generation of university leadership and of a national communication policy, carried forward by a communications secretariat, a production centre with thirty years of archive, and a present-day team that includes journalists who began in CREACOM as a production unit. Its anniversary coverage in 2025 explicitly framed the channel's first eight years in those terms, as the growth of a space of freedom that continued learning and offering the word as a common good.

Assessment and present position

Xama TV is a small channel by any technical measure, one digital subchannel in one provincial capital, but its documented history is unusually clear for a station of its size because its owner is a public university that publishes its acts. Its founding prehistory in CREACOM in 1986, its online start in 2015, its TDA launch on 33.1 on 25 October 2017, its formal creation by the Consejo Superior, its cable and streaming distribution, its BACUA and RENAU content sources and its status as the first public channel of San Juan are all verified in university sources. What the record does not provide is audience measurement, staffing numbers or a detailed programme schedule, and none is supplied here. Xama TV continues to broadcast as the Universidad Nacional de San Juan's signal, online and on digital terrestrial television, as San Juan's university and public voice on open television.