About El Trece

El Trece

El Trece is one of Argentina's two dominant free-to-air television networks and the historic rival of Telefe at the top of the national ratings. Broadcasting as LS 85 TV Canal 13 from Buenos Aires, it is a general entertainment network owned by Artear, the television arm of Grupo Clarín, Argentina's largest media conglomerate. Its headquarters are at Lima 1261 and Cochabamba 1153 in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Constitución, and its schedule mixes prime-time fiction, entertainment and reality formats with the long-running Telenoche news and a family of related pay-TV channels. In Greater Buenos Aires it broadcasts on VHF channel 13 and digital UHF channel 33.

The station first aired on 1 October 1960, which makes it one of the three commercial channels that defined Buenos Aires television in its founding decade, alongside Canal 9, which launched the same year, and Canal 11, the future Telefe, which followed in 1961. Through state ownership in the 1970s and 1980s and then three decades under Clarín control, El Trece has remained a central institution of Argentine public life: the channel of landmark comedy, drama and journalism programmes, and the television flagship of the Clarín newspaper and media group.

Overview

El Trece operates as a national network from its Buenos Aires flagship. Outside Greater Buenos Aires the channel is available nationwide via cable and satellite, and its programmes are rebroadcast by two stations owned by Artear, El Doce in Córdoba and Canal Siete in Bahía Blanca, alongside five stations commercially represented by Artear and three further stations carrying El Trece independently. That affiliate structure, combined with universal pay-TV carriage, gives the network national reach comparable to Telefe's, while production remains concentrated in Buenos Aires.

The network broadcasts in Spanish in 1080i high definition, downscaled for its standard-definition feed. Its official website is eltrecetv.com.ar, which provides live streaming of the channel, programme information and catch-up video. Sister pay-TV services include the news channel Todo Noticias, the entertainment channel Ciudad Magazine, the archive channel Volver and El Trece Internacional, extending the brand well beyond the free-to-air flagship.

History

Canal 13 was founded in 1958 and started broadcasting on 1 October 1960 at 8:30 in the evening. The licence was tendered to Río de la Plata S.A. TV, a company founded by the Cuban businessman Goar Mestre together with the United States network CBS, and the station was operated by Mestre's company PROARTEL. In the mid-1960s Editorial Atlántida and Mestre's wife bought shares in the channel. From that period Channel 13 began to compete strongly with the other private Buenos Aires channels, Canal 9 and Canal 11, which had followed similar paths of private operation linked to major United States networks.

The early schedules produced some of the foundational successes of Argentine television, including the comedy Viendo a Biondi, built around the characters of Pepe Biondi, the family drama La Familia Falcón starring Pedro Quartucci, and sketch comedy such as Telecataplúm, featuring Uruguayan comedians including Ricardo Espalter, Enrique Almada and Gabriela Acher. On 2 June 1971 the channel made an experimental colour broadcast in the early hours of the morning, nearly a decade before regular colour transmission arrived in Argentina.

In 1974 the government of Isabel Perón nationalised the station along with the other Buenos Aires private channels, Canal 9 and Canal 11, as part of a state-directed media policy. During the National Reorganisation Process, the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, administration of the channel was handed to the Argentine Navy. The Navy oversaw the station's transition to colour broadcasting on 1 May 1980. A fire partly damaged the Channel 13 studios on 2 July 1980, with no casualties among its workers. The station remained under public administration after democracy returned in 1983 until its privatisation at the end of the decade.

In December 1989 Arte Radiotelevisivo Argentino S.A., Artear, a company majority-owned by Artes Gráficas Editorial Argentino S.A., the publisher of the Clarín newspaper, officially took over management of the station. Artear had been founded in 1989 specifically to bid for the Buenos Aires channels 11 and 13 licences, and on 22 December 1989 it was granted the LS 85 TV Canal 13 licence, which it still holds. Since then the channel has generally been positioned second in the Buenos Aires ratings behind Telefe, competing head to head with it, with the notable exception of the 2010 to 2011 period, when El Trece became the ratings leader.

Ownership

El Trece is owned by Grupo Clarín through Artear, formally Arte Radiotelevisivo Argentino S.A. Grupo Clarín grew from the Clarín newspaper, founded in 1945, into Argentina's largest media group, with interests spanning newspapers, television, radio, cable and digital media. Within that structure Artear is the television production and broadcasting company: it holds the El Trece licence, operates the group's pay-TV channels and runs a major content production centre in Buenos Aires, inaugurated in 2017 and described by the group as the most advanced in the country in size and technology at the time.

Ownership by Clarín links El Trece editorially and commercially to the group's other news brands, above all the Clarín newspaper, Radio Mitre and Todo Noticias. Presenters, journalists and productions move between the group's outlets, and major stories are routinely developed across newspaper, radio, free-to-air television and the TN news channel simultaneously. That integration is a defining feature of how El Trece operates and of how it is perceived in Argentine debates about media concentration and political influence, in which Grupo Clarín is a central and often contested actor.

Programming

El Trece's programming follows the classic Argentine general-network model: morning magazine and news programmes, daytime entertainment, afternoon talk and game shows, and a prime time built around fiction, major entertainment formats and Telenoche. In the 1990s, its first full decade under Artear, the channel achieved strong ratings with political comedy associated with Tato Bores, cultural programming such as La aventura del hombre, and series including La Banda del Golden Rocket, Montaña Rusa, Gasoleros, Campeones de la vida and Poliladron. Those titles remain reference points in accounts of Argentine television drama.

Since 1996 the channel has worked closely with Pol-ka Producciones, the production company founded by actor and producer Adrián Suar, who in 2001 became the channel's programme manager. Pol-ka's fiction, long made for El Trece prime time, shaped the network's identity for a generation of viewers. In the 2000s the schedule's successes included sitcoms and telenovelas such as Soy gitano, Floricienta, in its El Trece incarnation, and Padre Coraje, the satirical news format CQC, and in 2005 La noche del 10, the entertainment programme hosted by Diego Armando Maradona. Marcelo Tinelli's Showmatch and its dancing competitions were for years the network's biggest entertainment draw after Tinelli's move to the channel, and Mirtha Legrand's long-running lunch and evening talk programmes returned to El Trece in 2014, underlining the channel's reliance on established star presenters.

The brand was refreshed repeatedly in the modern era. In 2000 the trading name became Canal Trece and in 2008 the current El Trece identity and logo family took shape. From 2002 the network adopted the practice of renewing its on-screen graphics package every year, a small but telling sign of how intensely the Argentine market competes on presentation. El Trece Internacional, launched in 2009, carries the schedule to audiences in the Americas and Europe.

News operation

News on El Trece is anchored by Telenoche, the prime-time bulletin whose name is known to generations of Argentine viewers and which the seed record for this profile singles out as one of the channel's defining programmes. The channel airs multiple bulletins across the day, including the early-morning Arriba Argentinos and a midday bulletin, with late-night summaries completing the cycle. Telenoche combines national politics, economics, crime, social reporting and sport, presented from the network's Buenos Aires newsroom and supported by Artear's correspondents and by the wider Clarín news-gathering operation.

The free-to-air bulletins work as one layer of a two-layer news system. For continuous coverage Artear operates Todo Noticias, launched in 1993, which is Argentina's most-watched news channel and shares journalists, stories and live resources with El Trece. Major breaking stories typically appear on TN first and in depth, with El Trece providing the mass-audience summaries at fixed bulletin times. El Trece's own website and social channels extend the bulletins with clips, live blogs and streaming, so that Telenoche and the daytime bulletins reach viewers well beyond their linear slots.

Distribution and reach

Within Greater Buenos Aires, El Trece is available free to air on channel 13 and on digital terrestrial television, and it is carried by cable and satellite operators across Argentina. The owned stations El Doce in Córdoba and Canal Siete in Bahía Blanca rebroadcast its programmes with local content, and affiliated and commercially represented stations extend the same model to other provinces. The result is a genuinely national footprint built, as with Telefe, on a Buenos Aires production centre and a patchwork of owned, represented and independent affiliates.

Artear's production centre gives the network technical capacity unusual in the region, supporting simultaneous production of fiction, entertainment and news for the flagship and the group's pay channels. Distribution increasingly includes streaming: the live signal and catch-up programmes on eltrecetv.com.ar and on operator platforms allow viewing on phones and connected televisions, and El Trece Internacional provides a curated feed for expatriate and regional audiences.

Digital presence

The eltrecetv.com.ar site is both a streaming destination and an entertainment news service in its own right, publishing programme clips, celebrity and show-business coverage tied to the channel's formats, and live video. Entertainment content performs particularly strongly for the network online, where moments from its talk shows, reality programmes and fiction premieres circulate widely on social platforms. The digital operation shares infrastructure and content with the rest of Grupo Clarín's digital portfolio, including the Clarín website and TN's news site, giving El Trece programmes promotional reach across some of Argentina's most-visited web properties.

Audience and significance

El Trece's significance rests on its position as one half of Argentine television's defining rivalry. Since the early 1990s, Argentine commercial television has effectively been a contest between Telefe and El Trece for first place, with the other Buenos Aires networks competing behind them. El Trece has generally held second place, taking the annual ratings lead in 2010 and 2011, and its fiction, journalism and entertainment have set agendas well beyond its own audience. As the television arm of Grupo Clarín, it is also inseparable from the wider story of the Clarín group itself, Argentina's most powerful media company and a central actor in the country's political and regulatory debates over media ownership.

Like Telefe, El Trece now faces the structural challenge of audience migration to streaming and social video. Its response has been to lean on its production capacity, its star presenters, its news strength through Telenoche and TN, and its digital reach across the Clarín portfolio. From Goar Mestre's PROARTEL in 1960, through nationalisation and Navy administration, to privatisation under Artear in 1989 and the HD and streaming era, the channel on VHF 13 has remained one of the two screens around which Argentine television is organised. That continuity, across radically different political and ownership regimes, is the clearest measure of El Trece's place in the country's media history.