About Señal U

Señal U

Overview

Señal U is the public university television channel of the National University of Cuyo, known in Spanish as the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo and by the acronym UNCUYO, based in Mendoza, in the province of Mendoza, Argentina. It broadcasts on channel 30 of Argentina's open digital terrestrial television system, the Televisión Digital Abierta, or TDA, and it has also been streamed live over the internet. The channel began its test transmissions in 2013, and the university presented it from the start as public, university, free and digital. Those four words were treated as its defining characteristics.

Señal U was described at its launch as the first public university channel of its kind in the Cuyo region of western Argentina: public in purpose, university in origin, free to receive, and digital from birth rather than converted from analogue. Its remit is educational and cultural rather than commercial. It was created to carry cultural content, scientific knowledge and analysis of local reality, with a strong emphasis on Mendoza itself, its people, its institutions and its eighteen departments.

Origins and legal basis

Señal U was made possible by Argentina's Audiovisual Communication Services Law, Law No. 26.522, often called the Ley de Medios. UNCUYO's own accounts stress that national universities had strongly supported that law, in part because they understood it as a collective creation that recognised the social role of universities.

University presentations on the project cited article 89 of Law 26.522 as the provision that allowed the university to have a frequency for open digital television, and recorded that the federal audiovisual authority, the Autoridad Federal de Servicios de Comunicación Audiovisual, or AFSCA, assigned UNCUYO signal number 30. Señal U was therefore not a commercial licence bought on the market and not a cable-only experiment. It was a public frequency assigned within a national policy of expanding free digital television, whose stated aim was to deepen social inclusion and integration.

Launch in October 2013

Señal U began emitting its test signal on Thursday 10 October 2013. UNCUYO recorded the starting moment as 13:30 on that day, and the first programme transmitted was Arte vivo, a series devoted to artistic expression in the province. The date coincided with the fourth anniversary of the passing of the Audiovisual Communication Services Law, so the launch carried a symbolic as well as a technical meaning.

The formal launch brought together the university's rector at the time, Arturo Somoza, the national Minister of Education, Alberto Sileoni, and the governor of Mendoza, Francisco Pérez. Contemporary reporting described a countdown in front of the studios and the start of transmissions on TDA channel 30, with documentary, journalistic and entertainment content and local productions. Reports at the time said the signal could initially be received in Greater Mendoza. From its first day, Señal U addressed a Mendoza audience first, even though its internet stream allowed it to be watched further afield.

Studios in General San Martín Park

The channel works from a building assigned to it by the university on Avenida San Francisco de Asís, without a street number, in Mendoza's General San Martín Park, a few metres from the Liceo Agrícola and the Departamento de Aplicación Docente, two of the university's schools. Contemporary reporting noted that the building had previously been used by a mobile telephone company and was converted into studios for the university broadcaster.

One part of the installation carried a particular local resonance. The channel's main studio was named after Leonardo Favio, the Mendoza-born filmmaker and singer, remembered at the launch as an extraordinary Mendocino and an Argentine of great talent. Naming it for Favio connected a very new digital channel to Mendoza culture and Argentine cinema, and signalled a home for local creation, not only a relay for material produced elsewhere.

Distribution on digital terrestrial television and online

In Mendoza, Señal U is received on channel 30 of the TDA, Argentina's free-to-air digital terrestrial platform. No subscription is required, in keeping with the channel's description of itself as free and digital. UNCUYO also announced from the launch period that the channel was streamed live on the internet, through its own web presence at the time and later through the university's Unidiversidad portal, for viewers in other Argentine cities and in other countries.

That combination mattered. Terrestrial broadcasting gave Señal U a place in the ordinary television grid of Mendoza households, alongside public and private channels, rather than confining it to a campus audience, while the online stream gave it a second, wider window. Special events illustrated that dual reach: the channel transmitted the final of the Mendoza Improvisation League live from the Teatro Independencia on channel 30 and over the internet.

Programming and editorial remit

From the outset, Señal U organised its content around three stated premises: entertainment, information and informal educational formation. Its thematic axes, as set out by the university on the channel's first anniversary, included culture, human rights, gender, politics, the economy, social movements, analysis and opinion on current reality, news and university life, and the popularisation of science. Above all, the university stressed locality and territoriality. The channel was to respect a diversity of voices, show the region and its development, and tell stories reflecting Mendoza identity.

The initial programming put that remit into practice through productions of its own, supplemented by material from Argentine public content bodies. The first own productions named by UNCUYO were En la caja, a thirty-minute interview programme with prominent figures from politics, art, culture and social life visiting the province and the university; Arte vivo, the arts programme with which the test signal opened, whose first edition took the UNCUYO Symphony Orchestra as its starting point; and Las palabras y las cosas, a documentary series reflecting on images, words and social realities. They were joined by Texturas, travelling through Mendoza's eighteen departments, and Itinerarios, which showed life in UNCUYO's faculties alongside graduates working in the community, and by rotating news flashes.

That own production was completed in early schedules by programmes and films supplied under agreements with the Banco Audiovisual de Contenidos Universales Argentino, or BACUA, the Centro de Producción e Investigación Audiovisual, or CEPIA, and material associated with the national film institute INCAA, as well as work shared through the National University Audiovisual Network, RENAU. Later listings published by the university showed the mix widening, with the debate programme Distintos Parecidos, Cultura al aire, the science programme Científicamente, Cuidado con el perro at midnight, national fiction in late prime time and cinema at weekends. Those listings belong to their period and are not a claim about the present-day schedule.

News on Señal U

News was part of Señal U's offer from an early stage, first in summary form and then in dedicated programmes. Early coverage described educational and cultural programming alongside several daily news summaries. The university later built more substantial formats. One was Edición U, described both as a short university news microprogramme, produced by the audiovisual production services area of the university's Centro de Información y Comunicación, or CICUNC, and as the channel's newscast, a space for current affairs and analysis seeking in-depth, critical treatment.

In its newscast form, Edición U was presented as a weekday programme on channel 30, with segments covering art and culture, sport, services and citizens' rights, Latin American scenes, gender and diversity, scientific dissemination and life stories. A later news service was Unidiversidad Noticias, in which panellists and guests addressed subjects circulating in the media and on social networks, broadcast on weekdays at midday and in a central evening edition on channel 30 and through the Unidiversidad site.

The university behind the channel

The National University of Cuyo is a public Argentine university founded on 21 March 1939, by a decree of President Roberto M. Ortiz, on the basis of existing institutions in Mendoza, San Juan and San Luis. Classes were officially inaugurated on 16 August of that year. It is described in reference works as the largest centre of higher education in the province of Mendoza, and at the channel's launch its rector described it as the oldest and most developed university in western Argentina, with responsibility in Mendoza and, through the Balseiro Institute, in San Carlos de Bariloche. Its schools include the Liceo Agrícola and the Departamento de Aplicación Docente, both close to the Señal U building.

Señal U was created as one expression of that university's policy of extending itself toward society. The university grouped it in a system of public media coordinated through CICUNC, alongside Radio Universidad, the university radio station on FM 96.5, and Edición UNCuyo, its publishing and news venture, with Unidiversidad later serving as the university's news portal and an online home for the channel's stream. Its stated obligation, as its rector put it at the launch, was also to be an open space for the wider community, including independent producers, cooperatives and municipalities.

Place in Argentine public and university television

Señal U belongs to a generation of Argentine university television created after the 2009 audiovisual law and the national rollout of free digital terrestrial television. In April 2014, according to the university's first-anniversary account, the channel joined the Consejo Federal de la Televisión Pública, a federal council for public television made up at that time of twenty-three public signals and the production centres of the national universities that composed RENAU.

The channel also presented itself to its peers directly. At the eleventh Meeting of Argentine Public Television, held at the Espacio Cultural Julio Le Parc in Mendoza, Señal U's director at the time, Cecilia Agüero, who had been its general coordinator at launch, took part in a panel on progress in installing university channels alongside the director of the National University of La Plata's channel, the director of INCAA TV and the coordinator of RENAU. The channel's aim was described there as representing the university and the plurality of voices of Mendoza, with high quality in production and content and a schedule unlike that of private channels.

Significance for Mendoza

The significance claimed for Señal U at its birth was considerable. Mendoza's governor said at the launch that it was the first time there had been a public television channel in the province and in the region, and the national education minister described a channel born with a different logic, one of belonging and identity rather than profit. The channel's importance lies less in competition for mass audiences, on which this profile offers no figures, than in the kind of television it was created to make: local production by and about Mendoza, university knowledge made publicly accessible, cultural and scientific content offered free over the air, and a screen open to producers and voices commercial television did not ordinarily centre.

That ambition also sets the honest limit of what can be said from the verified public record used here. That record is richest for its creation, legal basis, studios, channel 30 distribution and early programme grid, and much thinner for later history, current staffing and present schedule, which are therefore omitted rather than inferred. What the record establishes clearly is a durable idea: a public university in Mendoza acquired, under a new media law and a new digital system, a television voice of its own, and used it from 10 October 2013 to speak, in the first instance, to the society that sustains it.