About Uniteve

Uniteve

Uniteve is the free-to-air digital television channel of the Universidad Nacional de Villa María (UNVM), in the city of Villa María, Córdoba Province, Argentina. It began transmitting on 23 June 2016 on channel 34.1, in high definition, from the ARSAT terrestrial digital station, and it broadcasts twenty-four hours a day. Its studios are at Boulevard España 210 in Villa María. Uniteve is part of the university's Centro Integrado de Medios, a multimedia unit that also includes the radio station FM Universidad and the Uniteve Noticias news portal, and which was officially launched on 26 June 2016, three days after the television signal itself went on air. The channel's schedule mixes its own productions, co-productions and material from BACUA, the Banco Audiovisual de Contenidos Universales Argentino, the national public content bank.

Part of an integrated university media centre

Uniteve cannot be understood on its own, because the UNVM deliberately built it as one leg of a three-part media system. The Centro Integrado de Medios brings together Uniteve, the open digital television channel; FM Universidad, the university's FM radio station, which first went on air on 106.9 MHz on 6 December 2011 and is associated with ARUNA, the association of Argentine university radios; and Uniteve Noticias, the news portal for the city and region. The centre was launched officially on 26 June 2016. The design means a story gathered by the university's journalists in Villa María can move across television, radio and the web within a single newsroom structure — a level of multimedia integration that few institutions of the UNVM's size attempted when the centre was created.

The university behind the channel

The Universidad Nacional de Villa María is one of Argentina's younger national universities. It was created by Law 24.484, promulgated on 19 April 1995 after unanimous approval in the Chamber of Deputies on 21 December 1994 and passage in the Senate on 5 April 1995, becoming the third public university in Córdoba Province. The university describes its origins as communitarian — a project willed into existence by the city and region it serves — and by its thirtieth anniversary in 2025 it reported more than 12,000 active students and over 7,400 graduates, the great majority of them the first university graduates in their families. Uniteve expresses that same outward-facing mission in audiovisual form: the university's stated purpose is to interpret, transform and connect with the realities of its region, and the channel is one of the most public instruments it has for doing so.

The channel also connects with the university's teaching. The UNVM offers a degree in audiovisual design and production, and academic studies of university media in Córdoba note the institution's audiovisual communication training as part of the context from which its media grew. As with other Argentine university channels, the signal doubles as a professional environment in which the university's own community can practise the crafts it teaches.

Launch and technical footprint

Uniteve began transmitting on 23 June 2016 in the frequency 34.1 in high definition from the ARSAT terrestrial digital station — that is, as a native digital channel, born directly into Argentina's Televisión Digital Abierta rather than converted from an analogue predecessor. It emits twenty-four hours of programming daily. Beyond the TDA signal, the channel has been carried on cable: university information about its programming notes availability on channel 34 of Cablevisión and associated cable operators, which extends its reach beyond households equipped for digital terrestrial reception. Its studios at Boulevard España 210 place production inside the city, a short distance from the university's urban presence.

Legal context: the university channels wave

Uniteve belongs to the generation of Argentine university television created by the 2009 Audiovisual Communication Services Law, which reserved digital frequencies for national universities and transformed a landscape in which, for more than fifty years after television began in Argentina in 1951, the university system had produced only two channels. Academic studies of the sector count more than ten university channels on air in the years that followed, naming Villa María's signal — referred to in that literature as UNI TV — among them, alongside La Plata, Litoral, Córdoba, Río Cuarto, Cuyo and others. Uniteve's 2016 launch, the same summer as sister Córdoba channels such as UniRío TV, shows how quickly the interior universities moved to occupy the spectrum the law had reserved once the digital infrastructure, including the ARSAT terrestrial stations, was in place.

Programming

The documented structure of Uniteve's schedule is a combination of own productions, co-productions and BACUA material, broadcast around the clock. A well-documented example of its own production is Puentes, an eight-episode series made by the UNVM in 2019 under the Nexos Audiovisual call, promoted by the national Ministry of Education, the Secretariat of University Policies, the National Interuniversity Council and the RENAU university audiovisual network through the MundoU platform. Puentes premiered on Uniteve on Monday 25 May 2020 at 21:00, with each episode also released on YouTube, and the university's Academic Secretariat designed study guides so that teachers could work with the series — a clear illustration of the channel's educational function, in which a television premiere is designed from the start as teaching material. The series was made by Uniteve together with the Academic Secretariat, directed by Ramiro Carrera, produced by Cecilia Galasso and Vanesa Chiappe, and written by Javier Morello and Pablo Mensi. Through Uniteve Noticias, the media centre also maintains a continuous news presence for Villa María and its region. The BACUA component of the schedule deserves explanation, because it connects this small city channel to the national public content system: the Banco Audiovisual de Contenidos Universales Argentino is the national bank of Argentine audiovisual content from which public and university channels draw series, documentaries and cultural programmes, so a university signal in Villa María can complete its twenty-four-hour grid with nationally circulated material while reserving its own production capacity for the local and educational content that only it can make.

Villa María and the regional role

Villa María is one of the principal cities of Córdoba's interior, a dairy and agro-industrial centre whose university was itself a regional conquest: studies of the city describe the UNVM's creation as a turning point that consolidated Villa María as an educational pole for the whole zone and for the province. Uniteve gives that pole a television voice. In a national media system concentrated in Buenos Aires, and a provincial one concentrated in the city of Córdoba, an open channel produced in Villa María, by the city's public university, covering the city and its region through an integrated TV-radio-web newsroom, is a structurally significant piece of local media. Its twenty-four-hour signal, its HD birth on the public digital platform and its role as production house for nationally circulated university series such as Puentes together mark Uniteve as one of the more complete examples of Argentina's post-2009 university television model.

Radio and the news portal

The other two legs of the Centro Integrado de Medios explain how Uniteve's journalism circulates. FM Universidad, the university's radio station, first went on air on 106.9 MHz on 6 December 2011 — four and a half years before the television channel — and is associated with ARUNA, the network of Argentine university radios, which connects it to the programme exchanges of the national university radio system. Uniteve Noticias, the centre's news portal, covers the city of Villa María and its region in text and digital formats. A story in the centre can therefore originate in a television report, be followed on radio and be published on the portal, or move in the opposite direction. This integrated structure also gives the television channel something most small university signals lack: a permanent news-gathering operation of its own, rather than a production unit that assembles programmes without a daily news service behind it.

Access

Viewers can receive Uniteve free to air on TDA channel 34.1 in Villa María and the surrounding area, through the cable carriage documented on local systems, and through the university's online platforms, where programmes such as Puentes are published for on-demand viewing. The channel's output is in Spanish and is produced in Villa María for a local and regional audience, within the national framework of Argentine public university media.