About Net TV

Net TV

Net TV is the youngest of Argentina's national free-to-air television networks and the first new must-carry broadcast network the country had gained in more than half a century when it launched. It is a commercial network owned by Grupo Perfil and operated by Kuarzo Entertainment Argentina, headquartered in the Barracas neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. Net TV made its formal debut on 1 October 2018, becoming the sixth must-carry broadcast network of Argentina and the first in 54 years, after the launch of América TV in the 1960s. In a market whose channel map had been essentially frozen since the 1960s, its arrival was a genuine structural event.

The network was founded in 2016 and built during the expansion of Argentina's digital terrestrial television system, which created spectrum capacity for new services that the analogue era never had. Broadcasting on digital channel 27.2 in Buenos Aires and carried by cable and satellite operators nationally, Net TV offers a general schedule of talk, magazine, entertainment and news programming produced largely by Kuarzo, one of Argentina's busiest independent production companies. Its official website is canalnet.tv.

Overview

Net TV operates as a national commercial network from Buenos Aires. As a must-carry service, pay-TV operators are obliged to include it in their line-ups, which gives a channel without a legacy analogue frequency instant national distribution alongside Telefe, El Trece, El Nueve, América TV and Televisión Pública. Its terrestrial presence comes through the digital terrestrial system rather than a historic VHF channel number, a difference that shapes everything from its branding, which has no channel number to trade on, to its audience-building strategy, which depends on electronic programme guide position, operator carriage and digital promotion.

Programming is in Spanish and is centred on studio-based formats: cooking and lifestyle talk, morning and afternoon magazine shows, entertainment and show-business programmes, talk and debate formats and news bulletins. The network's headquarters in Barracas, in the south of the City of Buenos Aires, place it away from the traditional Palermo and Constitución media districts, in the publishing district associated with its owner, Editorial Perfil.

History

Net TV was founded in 2016 by Grupo Perfil, the publishing group behind the Perfil newspaper and a large magazine portfolio, as the group moved into free-to-air television. The project was developed with Kuarzo Entertainment Argentina as operating and production partner. Kuarzo, the Argentine production company built by Martín Kweller, was already a major supplier of entertainment formats to other channels, and the partnership gave the new network an instant production pipeline.

The network's formal debut came on 1 October 2018, opening with the cooking-themed talk show Como Todo. The launch was widely noted in the Argentine and international trade press for a simple statistical reason: Net TV was the sixth must-carry broadcast network in Argentine history and the first new one in 54 years, since América TV's predecessor Tevedos in the mid-1960s, or 1964 by the count used in the network's own launch coverage. Argentine television had seen channels rebranded, sold and nationalised for decades, but no genuinely new national free-to-air entrant. Net TV broke that pattern, made possible by digital spectrum planning and by a regulatory decision to license a new commercial service.

Since launch the network has built its schedule season by season, adding news bulletins, talk formats and entertainment programmes and adjusting its grid in response to ratings, in the manner of a challenger channel. Its history is therefore short compared with rivals founded in 1951 or the 1960s, but its launch date will remain a reference point in Argentine media history: the moment the closed map of Buenos Aires network television finally admitted a new name.

Ownership

Net TV is owned by Grupo Perfil, formally Editorial Perfil, the publishing company founded by Jorge Fontevecchia, which publishes the weekend newspaper Perfil, news and magazine titles including Noticias and Caras in their Argentine editions, and the perfil.com digital operation. Perfil's move into television extended a group whose identity was built in print and digital publishing into the country's most powerful medium, and it aligned the group's journalism and celebrity and lifestyle content with a broadcast outlet of its own.

Operation and much of the programming are in the hands of Kuarzo Entertainment Argentina, the network's operating partner. The arrangement separates ownership of the licence and brand, held within the Perfil group, from day-to-day production, supplied by a specialist entertainment producer with existing studios, formats and talent relationships. For a start-up network the model reduced risk: Perfil contributed the licence, brand and publishing promotion, while Kuarzo contributed the programme-making machinery that a new channel would otherwise have taken years to build.

Programming

Net TV's programming is deliberately format-driven. Its launch programme, Como Todo, a cooking-themed talk show, set the tone: accessible, studio-based, personality-led formats that can be produced daily at sustainable cost. The schedule has since been built from magazine programmes in the morning and afternoon, lifestyle and cooking content, entertainment and show-business coverage drawing naturally on Perfil's magazine expertise, talk and panel formats, and entertainment shows produced by Kuarzo both from its own format library and from international formats adapted for Argentina.

The network does not attempt to match Telefe or El Trece in prime-time fiction, where budgets are highest and the incumbents' advantages greatest. Its competitive space is the daytime and early-evening schedule and selected prime-time entertainment, where a well-cast talk or magazine format can hold an audience at a fraction of fiction cost. That strategy is the standard economics of a challenger network and explains the look of the channel: bright studios, familiar faces from Argentine entertainment, and programmes designed to generate clips and talking points for social media and for Perfil's own publications.

Programming information and the current grid are published on canalnet.tv. As with all Argentine networks, titles rotate by season, presenters move between channels, and the schedule is relaunched periodically, so the durable description of Net TV is its format mix rather than any single title.

News operation

News on Net TV draws on the journalistic resources of Grupo Perfil, whose newspaper and digital newsroom cover national politics, economics and society. The channel airs news bulletins within its daily schedule and current-affairs and interview programming that connects its entertainment-led grid to the news agenda. Perfil's profile as a news publisher, including its tradition of political journalism and interviews, gives the channel's news and talk output a character distinct from the entertainment-first identity of its daytime formats.

Digitally, news and programme content flow between the channel and perfil.com, one of Argentina's established news websites, so that interviews and stories originating on Net TV are published online by the group's newsroom and online stories are promoted on air. The arrangement gives a small network the digital news reach of a much larger publisher, and gives Perfil's journalism a television window it lacked before 2018.

Distribution and reach

Net TV's distribution rests on two pillars. The first is digital terrestrial television: in Buenos Aires it broadcasts on channel 27.2, available free to any household with a digital receiver. The second, and commercially more important, is must-carry status on cable and satellite systems, which places the channel in the basic line-ups of operators across Argentina and gives it national reach from launch. For a network with no analogue legacy and no affiliate stations, operator carriage is not a supplement to distribution; it is distribution.

Live streaming through canalnet.tv and operator apps extends the signal to mobile and connected-TV viewing. The network's reach should be understood in those terms: universally available in pay-TV homes and in digital terrestrial coverage areas, while building audience awareness against rivals whose channel brands are sixty years old.

Digital presence

Net TV was born into the streaming era and its digital presence was part of the design rather than an addition. The canalnet.tv site streams the channel, publishes the programme grid and hosts clips and catch-up content. Programmes are promoted through social accounts built around clips and moments, and through cross-promotion across Grupo Perfil's digital properties, which give the channel exposure to the publisher's online audiences. Kuarzo's formats likewise circulate as short-form video, the discovery route by which younger viewers most often encounter a challenger channel's content.

Audience and significance

Net TV's audience is, inevitably, far smaller than those of Telefe and El Trece, and it competes in the tier of the market occupied by the smaller national services and the larger pay-TV channels. Judging it by the incumbents' ratings misses its significance. Net TV demonstrated that Argentina's television market, closed to new national entrants since the 1960s, could admit one: that digital spectrum, must-carry rules and a publisher-producer partnership could create a viable sixth network. Its launch is cited in every account of modern Argentine television for exactly that reason.

The network also marks Grupo Perfil's transformation from a print and digital publisher into a cross-media group, and Kuarzo's evolution from programme supplier to network operator. For viewers, it added a genuinely new choice to the free-to-air dial, with a schedule of talk, lifestyle and entertainment that did not exist before October 2018. In a system where the other five national networks trace their origins to 1951, 1960, 1961, 1966 and the state tradition, Net TV is the proof that the map can still change.