About El Nueve

El Nueve

El Nueve is an Argentine free-to-air television network based in Buenos Aires, broadcasting as LS 83 TV Canal 9. It is one of the historic channels of Argentine television, first aired on 9 June 1960, and one of the five established Buenos Aires networks around which the country's commercial television was built. Owned by Grupo Octubre through Telearte S.A., it offers general programming centred on entertainment, talk and magazine shows, films and series, together with its Telenueve news bulletins and current-affairs output. In Greater Buenos Aires it broadcasts on VHF channel 9 and digital UHF channel 35.

Few Argentine channels have changed hands, names and identities as often as Canal 9. It has been Canal 9 Cadete, Canal 9 Libertad, Color 9, Azul Televisión and plain Canal 9 at different points in its life, has been nationalised and re-privatised, and has been run by some of the most colourful figures in Argentine media, beginning with Alejandro Romay, the man known as the czar of Argentine television. Since 2020 it has belonged to Grupo Octubre, the union-linked multimedia group that also owns the Página/12 newspaper, the IP news channel and the Argentina/12 signal.

Overview

El Nueve is a general entertainment network whose schedule, in its current incarnation, leans toward entertainment, talk, magazine and lifestyle programming, series and films, with news provided by Telenueve in several daily editions and political and current-affairs programmes in the evening. It broadcasts in Spanish from Buenos Aires, is carried nationally by cable and satellite operators, and streams live through its official website, elnueve.com.ar. Its sister signal within Grupo Octubre is Argentina/12, the news channel linked to Página/12, launched in its original IP form on 17 October 2020.

In the Buenos Aires ratings El Nueve has for many years competed for third place, behind the Telefe and El Trece duopoly and alongside América TV. Its audience position has been remarkably durable given its turbulent ownership history, resting on a loyal daytime and evening audience for its magazine, talk and entertainment formats and on the recognition of a channel number, 9, that has been part of Buenos Aires viewing since 1960.

History

The licence for channel 9 in Buenos Aires was granted on 28 April 1958 by decree to Compañía Argentina de Televisión, known as Cadete or CADETE. The company had been formed by brothers Curt G. and Frederick Lowe with support from the United States network NBC, which acted as a content supplier because Argentine broadcasting law barred foreign companies from owning shares in licence holders directly. The channel's first studios were at Castex 3345 in the Palermo neighbourhood. It began broadcasting on 9 June 1960 with comedy programmes, as Canal 9 Cadete, one of the three new commercial licences, for channels 9, 11 and 13, opened by the government of Pedro Eugenio Aramburu after the fall of Juan Perón's second government.

In 1963 Alejandro Saúl Romay, owner of Radio Libertad, became the channel's manager, and over the following years he acquired the stock held by the foreign investors, transforming Canal 9 into the first Argentine television network funded entirely by Argentine capital. Under Romay, nicknamed the czar of television, Canal 9 fought for first place in the ratings against Canal 13 and Canal 11, building its schedule on variety and entertainment. In 1972 its programme Almorzando con Mirtha Legrand was broadcast in colour experimentally, years before regular colour transmission. From 1963 to 1974 the channel was known as Canal 9 Libertad, after Romay's radio station.

In 1974 the government of Isabel Perón nationalised Canal 9 along with channels 11 and 13, and the station spent a decade under state administration, including the military dictatorship years, briefly branding itself Color 9 around the arrival of colour in 1979 to 1980. With democracy restored, Romay returned: from 1984 the channel was again Canal 9 Libertad under his control, and through the late 1980s and 1990s it remained a major entertainment force, home at various times to leading presenters and formats. Romay eventually sold the channel at the end of the 1990s to the Australian Prime Television group, under which it was rebranded Azul Televisión from 1999 to 2002, one of the most criticised identities in its history, before reverting to Canal 9.

The 2000s brought further owners, including the Mexican businessman Remigio Ángel González González's Albavisión group, and a programming era associated with Daniel Hadad's management, in which Telenueve was relaunched with a design consciously inspired by international news channels. In 2016 the channel adopted the elnueve brand, with the current logo dating from 2017. In November 2020 Grupo Octubre announced its acquisition of Canal 9 from Carlos Lorefice Lynch, in a transaction that also included the FM Aspen radio station and that was contested in litigation with Albavisión, whose owner claimed the channel in Argentine and United States courts. Grupo Octubre's own announcement stated it had acquired ninety per cent of the channel, with Lorefice Lynch retaining ten per cent and the channel presidency at the time. The seed record for this profile lists the owner as Grupo Octubre through Telearte S.A.

Ownership

El Nueve is owned by Grupo Octubre, the multimedia group led by trade union leader Víctor Santa María through the SUTERH building workers' union. Grupo Octubre's assets include the newspaper Página/12, founded in 1987, the magazines Caras y Caretas and El Planeta Urbano, radio station AM 750, the IP Información Periodística pay-TV news channel launched in October 2020 and the Argentina/12 channel, alongside cultural and educational ventures including the UMET university. The group acquired El Nueve in 2020, adding a free-to-air flagship to a portfolio previously centred on print, radio and pay television.

The channel's licence holder is Telearte S.A., the company that has operated Canal 9 through its recent ownership changes. The disputed history of that ownership, involving Albavisión's claims and Delaware court proceedings in the United States as well as Argentine litigation, has been extensively reported and forms part of the public record of the channel. For viewers and advertisers, the practical position since late 2020 has been stable: El Nueve operates as Grupo Octubre's general channel within an avowedly plural, union-backed media group whose other outlets, above all Página/12, have a well-defined editorial identity in Argentine politics.

Programming

El Nueve's programming has passed through distinct eras reflecting its owners. The Romay eras were built on variety, entertainment and star presenters. The nationalised decade mixed state priorities with popular formats. The Azul Televisión period experimented with a younger, imported identity. Later owners leaned variously on entertainment journalism, talk and imported series and films.

The current schedule, under Grupo Octubre, centres on entertainment, talk shows, magazine and lifestyle programmes, series and occasional original content, as the group's own channel descriptions summarise. Daytime magazine and panel programmes, afternoon talk and entertainment shows and evening current-affairs and entertainment formats form the spine of the day, punctuated by Telenueve. The channel has periodically hosted major entertainment figures whose moves between networks make Argentine television news: presenters and formats associated over the years with Canal 9 include Mirtha Legrand in its early colour era and, in later decades, a succession of talk and entertainment hosts who used the channel as a platform against its bigger rivals.

Because El Nueve lacks an in-house fiction factory on the scale of Telefe or El Trece's Pol-ka tradition, its prime time relies more on talk, entertainment, acquired series and films than on locally produced drama. That economics shapes its identity: it is a personality-led, studio-based channel, quicker and cheaper to programme than its fiction-led competitors, and dependent on the drawing power of its presenters.

News operation

Telenueve is the channel's news brand, airing in several daily editions covering national politics, the economy, crime, social affairs and sport. The bulletin was given a major relaunch in the Hadad management era, with a visual design and presentation style influenced by international rolling-news channels and a greater weight of political and in-depth reporting, drawing on the resources of the group's then-associated news brands Infobae and Radio 10. New anchors were introduced alongside established journalists, giving Telenueve a distinct identity within the channel's schedule for the first time in years.

Under Grupo Octubre, El Nueve's news sits within a wider group news operation that includes Página/12, AM 750 and the IP and Argentina/12 channels, allowing stories, interviews and political coverage to circulate across print, radio, pay television and the free-to-air flagship. Evening political programmes on El Nueve complement the bulletins, following the Argentine pattern in which the third and fourth networks compete for politically engaged audiences in the later evening. Bulletins and clips are distributed through elnueve.com.ar and social channels, with the live signal streamed on the website.

Distribution and reach

El Nueve's terrestrial signal covers Greater Buenos Aires on channel 9 and digital channel 35.1, and the channel is carried by cable and satellite operators throughout Argentina, giving it national availability despite having no owned regional station network comparable to Telefe's or El Trece's affiliate systems. National carriage on the main pay-TV platforms, Flow and Movistar TV among them, and streaming through its own website and operator apps constitute its practical distribution. Availability on the Televisión Digital Abierta platform ensures free-to-air access in the capital and in cities where the digital signal is retransmitted.

Digital presence

The elnueve.com.ar website streams the channel live, publishes programme information, news and video clips, and serves as the hub for catch-up viewing of its talk and magazine programmes. Within Grupo Octubre, the channel also benefits from the group's digital properties, including the Página/12 website, one of Argentina's most-read news sites, and the Octubre TV on-demand platform listed among the group's services. Social distribution of clips from its magazine and entertainment programmes is an important source of younger reach for a channel whose linear audience skews older.

Audience and significance

El Nueve's significance lies in its longevity and its role as the perennial challenger of Argentine television. It was the first Buenos Aires network to be wholly Argentine-owned, under Romay in the 1960s, a landmark in the national organisation of the medium. It gave Argentine television some of its defining entertainment eras, survived nationalisation, military rule, repeated sales and a disputed modern ownership transfer, and still holds a stable third-or-fourth place in the country's most competitive television market.

Under Grupo Octubre the channel also represents a distinctive ownership model in Argentine media: a free-to-air network held by a union-rooted group alongside a major newspaper and news channels, rather than by a traditional family or corporate conglomerate. Whether that model reshapes the channel's programming over time is one of the open questions of Argentine television. What is certain is the durability of the asset itself: more than six decades after Cadete signed on at Castex 3345, channel 9 remains one of the handful of numbers every Buenos Aires viewer knows by heart.